


New Friends

by bomberqueen17



Series: Two-Body Problem [7]
Category: Stargate Atlantis, Stargate SG-1
Genre: Crossover, Dick Jokes, Drinking, Episode Tag, Episode: S3e3 Irresistible, Episode: s10e03 The Pegasus Project, F/F, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-18
Updated: 2014-03-08
Packaged: 2018-01-09 03:15:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 6
Words: 25,239
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1140778
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bomberqueen17/pseuds/bomberqueen17
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Episode Tag to the SG-1 episode The Pegasus Project, during which SG-1 members Cameron Mitchell, Samantha Carter, Daniel Jackson, and new sort-of-probationary member Vala Mal Doran all come out on the Odyssey; Mitchell and Carter borrow Rodney McKay for some kind of elaborate scheme involving an Ori supergate, while Jackson and Mal Doran investigate the Ancient database for information about a weapon.<br/>Some dialogue is taken directly from the episode. It contains the famous Lemon Incident, in which Sheppard sort of uncharacteristically is mean about Rodney, offers to shoot him in the middle of a meeting, and gives Mitchell a lemon to use to keep McKay in line if he misbehaves; this has been the source of some controversy in fandom because it's a little out of character for John to go quite that far in his Rodney-baiting. But from the point of view I used here, I think it actually makes reasonable sense.<br/>This is a long game, though, because I heart Vala, think she kind of actually got the shaft in SG-1 canon, and think she and Sheppard would be fast friends. So here's where that starts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. A Wile-Friendly Establishment

John leaned on the balcony railing, waiting for SG-1 to beam down. He’d only met Lt. Colonel Carter a couple of times, but he knew all about McKay’s problematic history with her. He nudged Rodney with his good shoulder. “Hey,” he said. 

“What?” Rodney asked. 

“Don’t embarrass me,” he said. 

Rodney drew himself up, lifting his chin. “What do you mean by _that_?” he demanded. 

“You always say stupid shit to Carter,” John said. “Don’t.”

Rodney’s chin lifted even more. “I can’t help it,” he said. “She’s my Kryptonite.”

“If you can get through this without embarrassing me I will give you like, a hundred blowjobs,” John said. He knew nobody could hear them from here. 

“A hundred,” Rodney said, skeptical.

“Yeah,” John said. “And if you don’t, I’m gonna make you sorry.”

“Ha,” Rodney said. “Get that jaw warmed up, Colonel.”

John rolled his eyes. “I’m not worried,” he said. 

The glittering beam resolved abruptly into four people. Carter, Mitchell, Jackson, and a dark-haired, thin woman he didn’t know. “Hel _lo_ ,” John said, mostly to piss Rodney off, as he pushed himself up from the railing. “Who’s this?”

“That’s the new alien,” Rodney said, tearing his eyes off Carter. He turned to John. “Oh c’mon. Really?” 

John grinned lazily at him. “She looks fun,” he said. 

“Really? Now you decide to Kirk out,” Rodney said, following him down. 

“Don’t embarrass me,” John said again. He came down the steps and saluted Carter a little lazily, and Mitchell even lazier still. “Colonels,” he said. “Lovely to see you. Welcome to Atlantis.” He turned to Vala. “You must be Vala Mal Doran?”

“Yes,” she said, and looked him up and down in frank appraisal. “You _must_ be Colonel Sheppard.”

“Indeed I am,” he said, “and this is my esteemed colleague, Dr. Rodney McKay, who is under strict instructions to behave himself.” John said the last part to Carter. 

“Yes well,” Rodney said, giving him a dirty look. Elizabeth came down the steps then, and the others took a moment to greet her politely. 

Vala turned to Daniel and said, with no effort to be quiet, “It’s just not fair that AR-1’s team leader is so much hotter than SG-1’s. It’s like he got Mitchell’s share of cute, too, when they were handing it out.”

“He’s standing right there,” Daniel said tightly, having had eye contact with John the entire time. 

John grinned, and said, “It’s better when people don’t talk about you behind your back,” with genuine pleasantness. 

“I know he’s standing right here,” Vala said. “I’m waiting for him to turn around and walk away so I can check out his arse.”

“I was going to walk with you,” John said. “It’s probably better that way, my ass isn’t my best feature.” 

“It’s got to be better than Mitchell’s,” Vala said. 

“I can’t take you anywhere,” Daniel said. 

“Quite the contrary,” Vala said, smirking, “I make friends everywhere I go.” She took John’s arm, and he grinned at her and tucked her elbow into his side. 

“I can see that,” he said. 

Elizabeth raised an eyebrow at him as he came up the steps with Vala’s arm in his, and he gave her a quick wink. Rodney was completely ignoring him, absorbed in puffing himself up for Carter. It was irritatingly childish of him. John sat down, Vala sitting next to him, and caught Rodney’s eye across the table. Rodney paused mid-huff, and John raised his eyebrows and pushed his tongue against the inside of his cheek, just enough for it to show. 

Rodney blushed and shut up, looking down at his hands, and John turned the gesture into a yawn. He was trying not to be genuinely bothered about the Carter thing, and just pass it off as silly, but it really was every bit as bad as he’d been warned, and it made him feel a little cold in the pit of his stomach. He’d been sleeping with Rodney for more or less two years at this point, and all it took was for this poor woman to be within ten feet of him for McKay to start pouring on all the total-not-charm John had thought he was past. He was overtly leering at her, he was sexually harassing of her, he was unfunny and by turns fawning and condescending to her. It was every bad thing anyone had ever said about McKay, all at once. 

Forget a hundred blowjobs, Rodney had blown it so badly by now that he’d be lucky if John ever put his mouth near his dick again. Or any part of him. It took everything John had not to yell at him to shut the fuck up. He resorted to sarcasm instead. The umpteenth time Rodney said something incredibly obvious, John had to speak up. 

“I’m sure they thought of that before they came all this way, Rodney,” John said. 

Of course they had, and Carter explained, and Rodney started to get agitated and talk over her, and it was a clusterfuck and John wanted to either shoot him or sink through the floor. Maybe both. If only the lurid and fantastic stories on the Atlantis intranet were right and he had a constant psychic connection to the city, he’d be able to find something like, oh maybe a fire suppressant system, or something, and turn it on with his mind, and suck Rodney straight out the window. That’d be great. 

In the most recent of those stories that he’d read, he was Rodney’s sex slave. That’d be okay too. Because then he wouldn’t be here witnessing _this_.

“— A St. Bernard and a chihuahua,” McKay said, with a vague hand gesture that made John cringe. Jesus fuck, now he was talking about dogs fucking. 

Vala spoke up for the first time. She’d been watching John, and seemed to have caught on a little bit to his anguish. “And the problem with that would be…” 

Of course. She was an alien. She didn’t know what the fuck a chihuahua was. It’s not like McKay had spent the last almost three years on a gate team with an alien or two and didn’t already know when he needed to explain things, or anything. 

“Well, obviously it’s a problem of, uh,” McKay said, and trailed off. Jackson sighed. McKay’s face closed off suddenly, and it was an expression John hadn’t seen in literally months. “You’re mocking me, aren’t you.”

Vala blinked. “What? Um, no, I’m not from Earth. I honestly didn’t get the reference.”

John smiled at her, trying to think of how to explain McKay without sounding like the guy was his pet geek or something (evidently, from his current behavior, he wasn’t John’s _anything_ ), and then suddenly it was like the slow-motion cut scene in a movie where everything went to shit, because McKay started to _goddamn fucking explain the goddamn fucking logistics of a tiny dog fucking a giant dog and no no no no no_.

“Oh,” Rodney was saying, “well, they’re both dogs,” and he gestured with his hands and John wished with absolute sincerity for the floor to swallow him whole. 

“Mc _Kay_!” Carter said sharply. The way you would to a misbehaving dog.

Never. Again. Rodney was never, ever, ever getting a blowjob ever again. John slouched even lower in his chair, tight smile painted on as thin as it’d go. 

“Colonel Carter, please continue,” Weir said. 

“If he speaks again, I’ll shoot him,” John said, utterly sincere. He had a stunner with him. If time weren’t an issue, he’d totally do it. And when this was over, he was going to give the stunner to Mitchell and tell him when to use it.

They made it through the rest of the meeting without discussing the mating habits of any animals, and John did not slink under the table or make a break for a window, but when Weir asked him if he could spare Rodney from his team, he said “Hell, you can keep him,” and meant it. 

 

 

He got caught up in the day-to-day concerns, including getting his ass kicked by Ronon (and badly tweaking his fucking bad shoulder in the process, which put him into a foul mood), and didn’t see their SG-1 visitors again until it was nearly time for dinner. He was walking with Ronon past the control room when he spotted Jackson’s distinctive profile on a balcony. He started toward them, then thought about their postures and realized maybe they were having a not-business-related discussion, but Vala had already heard his footsteps and turned. 

“Oh,” she said, “hello.” Her eyes went past him to Ronon. “Oh,” she said again, rather more intensely, “hel _lo_.”

Which just fucking figured. He hadn’t been planning on taking the innocent flirting any farther with her, but being thrown over for Carter by his semi-boyfriend had kind of taken him down a peg and it would be nice not to be utterly lost in Ronon’s hot, glowering shadow for once. But that was the way of the world. The guy was six-four, still shy of thirty, and barely wore shirts, there wasn’t much John’s pasty beat-up almost-fortyish ass could do to compete. 

“Hey,” John said graciously, “Vala Mal Doran, this is Ronon Dex, a member of my team. You and he probably have a lot to talk about, what with having idiot Earthlings as coworkers all the time.”

“Do you know what a chihuahua is?” Vala asked Ronon. John caught Jackson’s gaze and rolled his eyes. Jackson just looked thoughtful.

“No,” Ronon rumbled.

“Apparently it’s a dog,” she said. “I still don’t understand.”

“It’s not even worth explaining,” John said wearily. 

“You probably deserve some sort of medal,” Jackson said, patting John’s shoulder. “If he’s always like that.”

“That’s the thing,” John said, “he’s not. I swear to God, like 99% of the time, McKay’s a rational, reasonable human being, with a good sense of humor, a reasonable grasp of how to make conversation, and a good head for getting us out of trouble. I’m alive today, fifteen times over, because of him. But it’s like Carter melts his brain somehow, and he’s just this— this—“ He fumbled for words a moment. “Dick!” he finished finally, gesturing explosively. 

“Oh,” Ronon said, “you got the McKay Special today, huh?”

“He was talking, in a professional meeting, about _dogs fucking_ ,” John said. 

“I didn’t catch the part about the fucking,” Vala said, perking up.

“We didn’t let him get that far because it was stupid,” John said. “Supergates are not dog vaginas.”

“A dog is a pet animal, right?” Ronon said, brow furrowed. 

“Yes,” John said, “but it doesn’t matter.”

Jackson sighed. “Some varieties of dog, like a St. Bernard, are very large,” he said patiently, holding out his hand waist-high, indicating a large dog, “and others are very small,” and he held his hands together, as if holding a teacup dog. “They’ve been selectively bred for vastly different traits over many years. So naturally the logistics of mating the two would be insurmountable.”

“See,” John said, “that’s elegantly put, but it’s still _dog vaginas_ , which did not need to be brought up in that conversation _at all_.”

“There’s kind of a philosophy to McKay,” Ronon said. “You just kinda let that shit flow past you because your anchor is the fact that he’s gonna save your ass later.”

“That was downright poetic,” Jackson said. 

“It was,” John agreed, giving Ronon a calculating look. The guy didn’t usually talk so much to strangers, but then, ah, Vala was eyefucking him, and that was a pleasant experience. 

“He’s not really like Teal’c at all,” Vala said. “Muscles almost never says that many words at once.”

“He will if it’s warranted,” Jackson pointed out. 

“C’mon,” John said, jerking his head. “It’s time for dinner. The mess hall is serving some Athosian dishes tonight, they usually do on Second Wednesday.”

“Second Wednesday,” Jackson said. 

John scratched the back of his head. “I forgot, that’s not a thing. We have all kinds of weird leap days and things here, because our solar and lunar calendars don’t match up with Earth’s in the slightest. Instead of just making up a new one, we kind of recalibrate to Earth’s calendar a lot. Sometimes the week is eight days and we usually call it Second Wednesday and that’s when we do all the periodic things you never get around to any other time.” 

Jackson’s brows went up. “The anthropologists here must be very happy,” he said. 

“Someone told me,” Vala was saying to Ronon, and how had that happened? John had let himself get sucked into talking with the geek instead of the hot alien chick. It was pretty much the story of his life. Not, again, that he was going to _do_ anything with the hot alien chick. He might as well leave it to Ronon; if an AR-1 team member was going to bang someone from SG-1, it’d be Ronon. Definitely not McKay, because he was absolutely never going to get anywhere with Carter, except maybe shot, and not necessarily by John.

“—someone told me,” Vala was saying, “that AR-1 was like, a kind of mirror image of SG-1, or like, a copy perhaps, and so our Mitchell was your Sheppard, and our Teal’c was you, and our Carter was McKay or maybe McKay is your Jackson, but then that leaves me as your Teyla, and I don’t know how I stack up. Obviously your Sheppard is light-years more attractive than our Mitchell, and it’s sort of taste-dependent but I’d say you’re hotter than Teal’c, but I mean, then you have McKay, and he sort of drags the whole average down, what with his mouth and all. So it’s down to me.”

“We are not mirror images,” Jackson said, “and for God’s sake, don’t compare me to McKay just because we both have PhDs.”

“Oh, it’s not just that,” Vala said, “I don’t know what a PhD is, it’s that you’re both fair-haired and you both have nice shoulders and blue eyes. I must say, his eyes are bluer, but I’d say your shoulders are nicer.” Jackson stared blankly, at that, and Vala smiled, turning back to Ronon. “So am I more attractive than your Teyla?” Vala asked. 

“I think the comparison breaks down,” John said diplomatically, still watching Jackson’s brain stuttering to process having his physical appearance unfavorably compared to McKay’s. She was right, McKay’s eyes _were_ bluer, but as Jackson was bigger overall, his shoulders were broader. But McKay’s ass was much, much prettier than Jackson’s. John wasn’t stupid enough to say so, though.

“Uh,” Ronon said, eyes crinkling with either mirth or trouble or both, “no offense, but there’s pretty much nobody hotter than Teyla.”

“Anyway Mitchell’s not so bad,” John said, quickly, before Vala could really react, and Jackson caught on and grinned at him. They must’ve had bad luck today, they’d both looked pretty down. “He’s definitely got more of a booty than me.”

Vala drew herself up. “Not so bad,” she said. “He’s a big blockhead and his most useful trait is the ability to get his arse kicked repeatedly.”

“Hey,” John said, “that’s _my_ superpower. Dude’s bitin’ my style.”

“You do get your ass kicked a lot,” Ronon said unhelpfully. 

“You just don’t like Mitchell because he’s immune to your wiles,” Jackson said to Vala, pronouncing the last word with delicate precision. 

Vala shot him an almost-pouting look. “That’s not it _at all_ ,” she said, which indicated that it totally was.

“I _like_ wiles,” John said. “This is a wile-friendly establishment. Right?” 

Ronon looked over at him, eyebrows raised. “Uh,” he said, “sure.”

They wandered toward the mess hall, and Vala gravitated rather gratifyingly back toward John. “So you’re a wile-appreciator,” she said. “Does that do you favors, out here in the Pegasus Galaxy?”

John threw her a look. “I’m a wile- _user_ ,” he said. “During the first year of our expedition we were cut off from Earth and had to get food and ammunition by… whatever means necessary.”

“I think I read some of those reports,” Jackson said faintly. “They were impressively… euphemistic.”

“I have done some shit that does not need to be immortalized in plain language,” John said. “A guy’s gotta do what a guy’s gotta do. I’m a big fan of wiles. We avoided starvation because of wiles.” 

“I’ve definitely used wiles to avoid starvation,” Vala said, more contemplative than flirtatious. 

“Speaking of starvation,” John said. “Here’s the mess hall.”

“And Teyla,” Ronon said. “Looks like she’s back.”

Teyla was already sitting at a table with another of the Athosians. She had a distinctive-looking clay jug sitting on the table. “Is that what I think it is?” John asked. 

Teyla smiled broadly. “It is,” she said. “We celebrate favorable terms.”

“Oh fuck yes,” Ronon said. “Ruus wine.”

“Oh my,” Jackson said. 

“Teyla,” John said, “Marta,” to the other Athosian woman, “these are our visitors from SG-1, Dr. Daniel Jackson and Vala Mal Doran. Dr. Jackson is from Earth, and Vala is from…” He paused, and turned. “I don’t actually know.”

Vala smiled. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Not Earth, but the Milky Way galaxy.”

John shrugged. “All right,” he said. “Anyway. This is Teyla Emmagan, a member of my team, and her fellow Athosian Marta Dannata, who is a member of AR-5.”

“Tonight’s dinner is the food of our people,” Teyla said. “I believe Earth natives find the roast anaara particularly appealing. Bring back an empty cup and we will introduce you to a traditional drink of my people.” The terms must have been very good indeed, because she was smiling very warmly. John had a suspicion that Teyla and Marta had already been celebrating a little while. 

Vala tucked herself up against John in the chow line, looking with great interest at the offerings. “I suppose I can see Ronon’s point about Teyla,” she said, a little wistfully.

“I met Teyla my first day in the Pegasus Galaxy,” John said. “She’s probably my best friend in the universe. I mean, you name it, we’ve been through it together.”

“Really,” Vala said, speculative.

“Oh,” John said, “not that.” He laughed. “She’s in my chain of command, I wouldn’t.”

“I’m not,” Vala said. 

John grinned at her, quirking an eyebrow. “In Teyla’s chain of command? No you’re not.” 

Vala laughed. “You think I have a chance with her?”

“She’s not particularly susceptible to wiles,” John said. “But sometimes, she finds the effort endearing.”

He caught Jackson’s stunned expression in the instant before the man schooled it back to polite interest, and snorted with laughter. “Jackson,” he said, “your face.”

“I’m not judging,” Jackson said. 

“No,” John said, “you’re not judging, you’re just blushing.” He walked back over to the table with his tray of food, Vala trailing behind. “You look awfully pleased,” he said to Teyla. “They must be really good terms.”

“Oh,” Teyla said, “they are.” She unstoppered the bottle and poured him a generous glass of ruus wine. “I finally got the better of that very irritating little man from Paros.”

“Aw,” John said, “the weird barleycorns guy? I wanted to punch him.”

“As did I,” Teyla said. “But, with Marta’s assistance, and some networking, we have managed to neatly cut him out of the entire trade. He wanted too much, and now he gets nothing.”

“Nice,” John said. 

“I still think I shoulda just shot him,” Ronon said. 

“My way is better,” Teyla said. She filled everyone’s glasses as they sat down. “Were not the other members of SG-1 coming as well, on the… _Odyssey_ , was it?”

“They were,” Dr. Jackson said, “but the others went on to complete the main mission that brought us out here. They are attempting to use a black hole in this galaxy to dial in to a supergate in our galaxy built by a race known as the Ori, who are trying to subjugate the entire galaxy.”

“Ah yes,” Teyla said. “I had read most of the mission report. I am… dismayed by news of this race.” She set her glass down. “I admit that I understood little of the science of what the _Odyssey_ is attempting to do. But I assume that Dr. McKay has gone with them, since he is not here?”

“Oh, yeah,” John said, rolling his eyes. 

Teyla looked around the table. “It is rare to find Colonel Sheppard and Dr. McKay away from one another’s company.” Her gaze settled on John. “Has he angered you? You seem exasperated.”

John shook his head, giving her a dark look over the rim of his glass. She raised her eyebrows, and looked around the table. 

“Dr. McKay, um,” Jackson said, “has a bit of a history with our Col. Carter, and he kind of tends to, um, put his foot in his mouth when she’s around. Honestly I thought he was always like that, but Col. Sheppard insists that’s not the case.”

Teyla smiled ruefully. “Dr. McKay is… sometimes a little… difficult to converse with,” she said. 

John put his head down on the table. “No, Teyla,” he said. “That doesn’t even cover today.” He raised his head just enough to speak clearly, and started ticking things off on his fingers. “He started off by just openly _staring_ at Carter’s ass, he made a crude ‘boobies’ gesture at one point, he compared the Stargates to an animal’s vagina, there were _hand gestures_ , Teyla. Hand gestures. About vaginas.”

“Well,” Vala said diplomatically, “ _I_ didn’t catch on to what he was talking about, so I don’t know that it counts.”

“Carter did,” John said. “Carter had to smack him down like a misbehaving child. Teyla,” and he sat up straighter, “Teyla, I asked him to behave himself. I told him not to embarrass us. And there he is, with his Atlantis expedition patch on his jacket, being a complete _ass_.”

“Yeah but that’s kinda what McKay does, though,” Ronon said. 

“No,” John said, despairing. “It was worse.” He pushed his empty cup over and Teyla obligingly refilled it.

Vala patted his shoulder. “I thought he was adorable,” she said. 

“If it makes you feel any better,” Jackson said, “Vala once told the chairman of the Senate appropriations committee that he had a tiny penis.”

John sat up straight, looked at Jackson, looked at Vala, and said, “From firsthand observation?”

“Oh, no,” Jackson said, straight-faced. “Apparently it’s the sort of thing you can tell from a man’s budgeting choices.”

“I wasn’t wrong,” Vala said. “Men who just want bigger and bigger weapons are all compensating for the same thing. I’ve extensive science to back this up, Daniel, don’t think I don’t.”

Teyla and Marta were both laughing so hard they nearly slid under the table, and it was contagious. Finally Teyla wheezed, “She is correct,” and it set them off again. 

“You’re gonna give me a complex,” John said finally, when he could speak. “You know how I feel about big guns.”

“Oh,” Teyla said, “John, no, you are not bad enough about it.” She wiped her eyes. “Ahh. Although I must say, for as much of you as I have seen over the years, I still somehow have never seen you in a state from which I could truly judge such a matter.”

John put his face back down on the table and howled with laughter. 

“I just like big guns,” Ronon said, “and I haven’t had any complaints.” He was laughing too, though.

“You I _have_ seen,” Teyla said. “No one could possibly complain.”

John jerked his head up from the table. “What! When?”

Teyla collapsed again in laughter, as did, surprisingly, Jackson. Finally Jackson wheezed, “Sheppard, your face.”

“Y’know,” Ronon said, utterly unperturbed. “Mornings. Sometimes. You know how it is.”

“I,” John said, then very deliberately and precisely said, “Yes,” and took another drink. God damn it now he was curious. How had Teyla seen Ronon’s dick and he hadn’t? It wasn’t fair. Aw fuck, now he was thinking about it. 

“I think their missions are maybe more fun than ours,” Vala said. 

“Mm,” Jackson said, but didn’t elaborate. 

“That means no,” John said. “That means he’s totally seen O’Neill’s wang like a million times.”

“It’s been something like a decade of working with the man,” Jackson said mildly, taking his glasses off and polishing them on his napkin. “It’s far from the most horrifying thing about the job, I’ll say that for sure.”

“We have not quite the same taboos on nudity and sexuality, among the Athosians,” Teyla said. “However, this does not mean I am unsympathetic to your conservative mores.” 

“Oh my,” Elizabeth said, appearing suddenly behind John. “I believe I can guess what all the hilarity was about, a moment ago.”

“Vala told the chairman of the Senate appropriations committee that he had a tiny dick,” John said a little unsteadily. 

“Back me up,” Vala said, turning to Elizabeth. “You’re a diplomat, they said. You know this is true. Men who go on and on and on about big gunships and giant weapons and all of that nonsense are almost always compensating for their tiny dicks.”

Elizabeth snorted, catching the back of John’s chair so she didn’t fall over. “Oh my God,” she said. 

“I’m tellin’ you,” John said, “I’m gettin’ a complex.”

Elizabeth straightened up, gasping with laughter. She put a hand on John’s shoulder— his bad shoulder, and he felt her thumb absently running along the edge of the brace under his shirt— perhaps absently, perhaps a reassurance, perhaps just a reminder that she knew he wore it almost all the time now. “Don’t,” she said. “You have _nothing_ to be self-conscious about, trust me.” She pointed at the jug on the table. “Is that ruus wine?”

“It is,” Teyla said. “Go and get a cup and a chair and join us. But do not think we will not ask you about that bombshell you just dropped.”

“What bombshell?” Elizabeth said innocently, and walked away. 

Everyone turned to look at John. “How would _she_ know?” Ronon asked. 

John’s ears burned. Crap. He was blushing. “You know,” he said. “Mornings. Sometimes.” Unbidden the memory came back to him, Rodney on his knees in the bed, John driving into him, Elizabeth’s eyes glittering in the shadow as she watched from across the room, and he took a long swig from his glass.

Vala craned her neck after Elizabeth, suddenly interested. “Is she in your chain of command?”

“Yes,” John said. “God. No! I never— we never— not like that!”

“My point is,” Elizabeth said smoothly, returning, “is that it’s clear your love of weapons and ships and things stems not from a desire to compensate for any lack of personal endowment, but rather,” and she pulled over a chair and sat down, “out of a simple desire to protect yourself and your people against pretty overwhelming odds.”

“But you’ve totally seen his dick,” Ronon said, unfazed by the smooth words. 

“Well,” Elizabeth said, and held out her cup as Teyla poured for her. “Not _exactly_ on purpose, but yes. And I assure you, he has nothing he needs to compensate for.” She took a sip of her drink, eyes bright with mischief. “Although, I will say, as a shrewd diplomat, this did not at all surprise me. It is not simply a man’s interest in heavy weaponry that gives him away, but also, I daresay, a certain element in how he treats others.” She tilted a hand at Vala. “And so I, knowing the chair of the Senate appropriations committee, am inclined to agree with your assessment. I thought him a petty, puffed-up sort with most likely a lot of shortcomings to make up for, dick size probably among them.”

“Is this something women talk about a lot?” Jackson asked. 

“I thought you were an anthropologist or something,” John said. “Of course it is.”

“I’m actually an archaeologist,” Jackson said. “I’m not really used to, you know, _conversation_.”

“It is one of many frequent topics of discussion,” Marta put in. “But we talk about men much less than men like to think we do.”

“But you can really tell how big a guy’s dick is from whether he’s a jerk or not,” Ronon said. 

“More like… what kind of jerk he is,” Elizabeth said. 

“By that logic, McKay’s gotta be tiny,” Jackson said. 

John happened to be taking a drink at that moment, and choked on it, coughing and spluttering. “You’d think that,” Elizabeth said, “but I also happen to know that’s not the case. He’s compensating for a terrible childhood, actually.”

“Have you seen _everyone’s_ dick?” Ronon asked. 

Elizabeth raised her eyebrows and shrugged, taking another drink. “I have resources,” she said. 

John, still coughing, finally managed to drag in a full breath. “Ow,” he wheezed. “Oh God. Ow.” 

Vala patted John’s back. “Breathe, Sheppard,” she said. “You’ll be all right.” She looked around the table. “At least we’re not talking about dog vaginas.”

“Oh my God,” Elizabeth said, putting her cup down firmly, “I almost killed Rodney. What the hell was his problem?”

“Carter,” John wheezed glumly. “He’s still fucking obsessed with Samantha Carter. He regresses to his absolute worst when she’s around.”

“That seems counterproductive,” Vala pointed out.

“No shit,” John said. He wondered if it would be worse if Rodney actually succeeded in putting on the charm. So far he’d never witnessed Rodney being successful at that— the Quindozum bitch had liked him way better before he’d been trying, and as for Norina, well, she was smart enough to appreciate Rodney for what he was, but hadn’t ever followed up. John had just been teasing with the cock-blocking then, figuring if she was really interested, she’d figure that out. But she’d been distracted by, well, her entire planet being destroyed, so it sort of figured she hadn’t looked Rodney up afterward. And as for Katie? Well, they weren’t discussing Katie. Rodney probably still had a chance with her, but only because he hadn’t bothered trying to charm her.

Vala still had her hand on his arm. “You seem more upset than simple concern for your team being badly represented would warrant,” she said. 

John sighed, aware of Elizabeth’s concerned look in his peripheral vision. “Yeah,” he said, “I’m pretty upset.” 

“To be fair, so am I,” Elizabeth said. “It’s really embarrassing.” 

“So let’s talk about something else,” Vala said. “And drink more.”

 


	2. Chapter 2

 

John woke slowly, aware first that he really, really had to pee. Like, really really. His second realization was that his shoulder really, really fucking hurt, which was no surprise; it was usually what woke him, nowadays. His third realization was that he wasn’t alone. He was wrapped warmly around someone’s body, arm around their waist and their ass/hip crammed up against his junk and face mushed into their shoulder. His fourth realization was that somebody was also wrapped around him from the back, a big hand curled around his bicep, someone’s breath warm and damp on the nape of his neck, and somebody’s morning wood poking him in the asscheek. 

Neither person smelled like Rodney. He blinked his eyes open, and his fifth realization was that he had a splitting headache and a sour stomach and was definitely hung-over as fuck. He also wasn’t wearing pants. Just boxers. 

The person behind him was Ronon; a dreadlock slipped down and smacked John in the face as he turned his head. Ronon was breathing slow and shallow, deeply asleep as he never was on missions. And yeah, that was a giant stiffy against John’s ass; he wriggled just a little bit, surreptitiously, and decided he had enough information right there. Yup, that was a giant stiffy. 

But the person in front of him wasn’t Teyla. She smelled feminine, but there was no incense, no leather, none of the sharp-smelling oil Teyla used in her hair. Her hair was black. John collected himself a little. Vala Mal Doran, from an unknown planet in the Milky Way. He was spooning with Vala. How the hell had he come to be spooning with Vala?

He really, really, really, really had to pee, and his cock was probably poking Vala just as much as Ronon’s was poking him. So he very, very gently disentangled himself from Ronon’s grasp. Ronon snorted, cracked an eye to look at him, and rolled over without fully waking up. John sat up, cradling his bad shoulder and letting himself grimace, since nobody was looking. Teyla was on the other side of Ronon, curled around Marta with oh, with her hand up Marta’s shirt, that was, well, John had sort of known they were that kind of friend but he sort of didn’t need to see it. 

Well, it wasn’t like it could make his cock any harder than it was already. Which wasn’t fair, c’mon, you’d think his various aches and pains would tone that down, but it was sort of depressing to contemplate how used to pain he was. If he ever had a moment where he wasn’t in pain, he’d probably pass out from the shock.

He stepped out of the pile of bodies. Vala sighed and curled tighter. She had her head pillowed on her bundled-up jacket, and was nestled up behind Jackson, not quite spooning him. The pile of bodies was on the carpeted floor of— Jesus, they were in Elizabeth’s quarters. Where was Elizabeth? John racked his pounding, fuzzy brain for the memory. Yes, they’d gotten quite drunk, and had come up here, and he only vaguely remembered the conversation from then onward. 

There was Elizabeth, on the couch by herself, completely passed out. John glanced at his watch. It was five am. It just fucking figured that his old man bladder would wake him up just when he usually woke. He staggered into the bathroom and experienced the usual difficulty with the catch-22 of needing to lose the erection to pee comfortably and not being able to lose the erection without relieving the pressure on his bladder by peeing. It was a serious design flaw in the human body, worse even than the bullshit that was the entire shoulder joint even when it was working— such a crap piece of engineering, really, and so prone to failure, though he supposed he couldn’t really blame his for having trouble recovering from a giant fucking crossbow bolt. Still, he was particularly grouchy about it today. Eventually he managed to achieve both goals, and washed his hands and drank about twenty ounces of water from the nice glass tumbler Elizabeth kept by her sink. 

He came out and Vala was sitting up, looking at him. It wasn’t completely dark in the room; the pillars had their usual little lights down the sides illuminated, and he could see her wary expression as she looked at him. He waved a hand at her, indicating that there was no danger, and stood a moment with his good arm supporting his bad arm, both wrapped around his torso, surveying the pile of bodies. He could climb back in and attempt to get some more sleep, or he could drag himself back to his own quarters, or he could give up on sleeping and go about his day. It was Thursday, and he hadn’t anything scheduled in particular, since he’d sort of left things open for when the _Odyssey_ came back. They were due in around midmorning. He wasn’t much for napping nowadays, so if he was going to get any more sleep now would be the time to do it.

But if he left, he could go take a pain reliever, and stop his goddamn shoulder from screaming at him all day. And his knee was mad at him for sleeping on the floor, too, so there was that. Leaving was looking better.

Except if he left he’d have to first find his damn pants. Hm. He still had his t-shirt on, but his jacket was somewhere. His boots he remembered leaving by the door. He wandered over and sure enough, there were his pants, by his boots. He pulled them on, shoved his feet in the boots, and slipped out of the room. 

He wasn’t entirely surprised when in a moment the door opened again and Vala came out. “What is it?” she asked. 

John shrugged. “Nothin’,” he said. “I usually wake up around this time.” 

“Oh,” she said. “You had the strangest expression on your face. Also, I was cold when you were gone. I had rather been enjoying that snuggle.”

“Ronon’s hard-on was pokin’ me in the butt,” John said. “It was intimidating.”

“Mm,” she said, “I didn’t feel that way about yours.”

John laughed, refusing to be embarrassed. “Good, I wasn’t trying to intimidate you.” He jerked his head. “Wanna go grab breakfast? The mess hall’s open.”

“I’m starving,” she said. “Good idea.”

She seemed too chipper. John glanced sidelong at her as they set off down the hallway. “Aren’t you hung over?” he asked. 

She smiled to herself for a moment before glancing over at him in her turn. “I already went through my hangover,” she said. “I still have enough naquadah in my blood that alcohol doesn’t really… work normally on me.”

John yawned, fuzzy-headed and confused. “Wait,” he said, “why’s that… I forget how you got naquadah in your blood.”

Her expression wasn’t cunning or coy or amused or flirty. She just looked tired. “Being host to a Gou’auld,” she said. 

John paused a moment, then resumed walking. “Right,” he said. “I had forgotten that.” 

“The symbiotes process alcohol for you,” she said. “Mostly because they dislike the feeling of a host being drunk. They’ll take it right out of you. But even once they’re gone, the effect’s still there.”

“So,” John said, finally drawing the conclusion, “last night you were just kinda pretending to be as drunk as the rest of us were.”

She shrugged. “I wouldn’t say I was pretending,” she said, with just a hint of smugness. “I was just going with the prevailing attitude. I never pretended I was drunk.”

“I don’t remember taking my pants off,” John said. 

Vala smiled mysteriously. “I may have suggested a drinking game, and you and Ronon got a little competitive.”

“Fuck,” John said. They reached the mess hall, which was only lightly populated at this hour— a few Marines stopping by after the change of guard shifts, a couple of scientists either finishing up all-nighters or going in early. Some of the labs had limited space, so a few scientists worked in shifts to maximize their lab time. Others just never knew when to stop. John thought their work hours could be better handled to prevent burnout, but it was quite clearly outside his jurisdiction so he’d never brought it up. He made a beeline for the coffee urn, then grabbed some dry toast. Vala hovered uncertainly a moment, then went and loaded her tray. 

She sat down next to John, who eyed the toast trepidatiously. “I’m hung-over as fuck,” he said. “But not as hung-over as I should be if I really got into it with Ronon.”

“Oh,” Vala said, “Elizabeth stopped you. I think Teyla would have let you continue, though. She thought it was funny.”

“I don’t know why I do that,” John said. “Ronon’s not even thirty, he’s like twice my size, he’s basically superhuman, and I still let him get me all fired up and competitive.”

“I don’t know either,” Vala said, “but it’s adorable when you do it.”

“Yeah, it’s gonna get me killed though,” John said. She was flirting with him but it was reassuringly non-serious. He’d forgotten how to really enjoy that. He very, very gingerly rolled his bad shoulder, froze when that proved to be a bad idea, and aborted the maneuver, hunching over to collect himself again. 

“Did he hurt you yesterday?” she asked. “You’d said something about sparring, and you’ve been favoring that arm all night.”

“Eh,” John said. “Not really. It was already screwed-up, he just made it worse.”

“Is it serious?” she asked. “Or will it heal up in time?”

He looked down into his coffee cup. “I’m kinda skatin’ a fine line with it,” he said. “It’s good enough for me to be on active duty, but only just barely, and Beckett wants to do another surgery on it. And if that goes well, I’ll probably be able to squeeze out another four, five years of active service, barring catastrophe, before I’ll have to retire. But if it goes poorly, I’m looking at an immediate medical discharge.” He shrugged his good shoulder. There was no point lying to Vala, she wasn’t going to turn him in. “Either way, he wants to send me back to Earth for it, and I don’t want to go.”

She didn’t say anything for a moment, and he looked up. She was looking thoughtfully at him. “What’s wrong with it?” she asked. 

It was odd that she was so curious, but he couldn’t see what harm there could be in telling her. “I got shot with a crossbow,” he said. “It tore up the soft tissues something awful, and chipped the bone. It’s been months and it’s as healed as it’s going to get on its own.”

Vala tilted her head, thinking, and applied herself to her plate. “You have the ATA gene, right?” she said. “Isn’t there any Ancient healing tech around this place?”

John shook his head. “Nothing that can help me,” he said. “Much to my disgust. There’s a scanner and a few other bits and bobs of equipment, but nothing that can regenerate tissue or accelerate healing or even knit fractures.”

“That’s odd,” Vala said, mouth full. She chewed, then swallowed, before continuing. “If the Gou’auld had so much of that kind of tech, you’d think the Ancients would. I sort of figured they stole whatever they had from the Ancients.” She shrugged. “I suppose a lot of it was Isis’s work, though.”

John gnawed unenthusiastically on his toast. “I’ve read up on Stargate stuff in general,” he said, “mostly before I came here, but I admit my knowledge of Milky Way things, and Gou’auld in particular, is pretty limited. I didn’t know they had healing tech.”

“Oh, yes,” Vala said. She popped a piece of cut fruit into her mouth, and chewed for a moment, then wiped her hands on her pants. “Come back to my quarters and let me have a look at you, now that I’ve got some food in me. I might have a trick or two.”

John stared at her. She stood up and held out her hand. “What kind of tricks would you have?”

She cocked an eyebrow. “Naquadah in the blood, remember?” she said. “I can use Gou’auld tech.”

“What Gou’auld tech do you have with you in another galaxy?” John asked, standing up slowly and taking her hand. 

“Darling,” she said, “I never let go of anything useful. Of course I have almost everything I own with me. Including Qetesh’s healing device.”

John followed her down the hall, a little dazed and still fuzzy-headed and hungover. The cup of coffee still in his hand wasn’t helping as much as he wished it would. “Qetesh?” he said, knowing it was far from the most important bit of that statement, but as it was the most jarringly confusing bit of it, he clung to it.

Vala gave him a look as she swiped open the door to the quarters she quite plainly hadn’t done more than change her clothes in. “My snake,” she said. She picked up the suitcase they’d beamed down for her. John sat in the desk chair and watched, observing that the suitcase was not of Earth make. It didn’t have zippers, but rather a system of buckles, and was made of a material that looked like a hybrid of fabric and leather. Inside, she had several smaller containers, and she opened one and said, “Aha.”

The thing she pulled out had a red sort of jewel-looking thing in the middle. “How’d you get away from Qetesh?” John asked, blinking at the thing. He realized he was instinctively reaching out to it with his mind as if it were ATA-keyed. It plainly wasn’t, and remained inert. 

“Oh,” Vala said, “you know. The Tok’ra tortured me until I broke, then tortured her to death, then let me go. The downside was, you know, all the torture, but the upside was that if a snake dies inside you there’s less damage on extraction and also you get a good whopping dose of naquadah. Sam Carter was a host so briefly she can hardly use this thing, but I’m so full of the stuff I’ll never lose the ability.”

John stared at her. “That sounds fucking awful,” he said. 

“Yeah,” she said. “It was, rather.” Her shoulders were a bit tense and she wasn’t facing him. But as he watched, her body language changed, and she turned, smiling easily. She was a phenomenal actress. “So come here and sit down. Maybe lie down, I’m not sure how strongly this will affect you because I don’t know how bad the damage is.” She heaved the suitcase off the bed and patted the edge.

John looked up at her. “Is it dangerous?” he asked. 

“No,” she said, “not for you.”

Warily, he asked, “Is it dangerous for you?”

“No,” she said, “not particularly. It’s just tiring.”

He stood up slowly. “You’re sure,” he said. He wondered how useful the device could be. Surely if she could actually fix him entirely, the SGC would be using her left and right. 

“Oh yes,” she said. “I don’t mind doing it. Oh, you’re trying to figure out what you’ll owe me. Nothing, Colonel. You and your people have been kind to me, the SGC always forgets I can do this, and it’s just a shame and a pity to see someone as pretty as you are damaged.” She smiled, toothy but charming. “I wouldn’t mind, though, if you ever have a chance to do me a favor, and do.” She patted the bed. “Now lie down and let me see how bad it is.”

John toed off his boots and sat down self-consciously. “Should I take the brace off?”

“Oh,” she said, “sure. Why not? Take your shirt off too.” She sat in the desk chair and put the device onto her hand, the red stone centered in her palm. 

John complied, with some difficulty. “This probably isn’t necessary, is it,” he said. 

“No,” she answered cheerfully, “but I might as well get something out of this besides the satisfaction of a job well done.”

It hurt too much for him to be flirty, and he sat a moment with his lips between his teeth, collecting himself again. Vala watched him, and when he was recovered enough to look at her, he caught a solemn expression on her face before she grimaced at him. 

“I see the scar,” she said. “That… probably hurt.”

“Every day,” he said, “all day, and worse if I have to use it. But if I can’t use it, then I’m not fit for duty and they’ll send me home.”

She nodded, stood up, and said, “On your back, now.” She was concentrating now, her face going serene, and he remembered that the Gou’auld considered themselves gods and chose their hosts accordingly, at least partly for their looks. She did look goddess-like and regal like this. She was a beautiful woman, with black hair and keen blue eyes and a generous mouth. When he was younger, she would have been his type. Lately, he didn’t seem to have a type. Just Rodney. 

That didn’t really bear thinking about.

John lay back and stared up at her, slightly alarmed as the stone started to glow. “This might hurt,” she said distantly, “or at least feel very strange. Try not to move and don’t be alarmed.”

He was considering a flippant answer, but was distracted by a tingling feeling. The fingers of his left hand often tingled, but the feeling was intensifying, and was running all the way down from his shoulder, and out across his chest, and now it was more like a hard prickling. 

“Nerve damage,” she said thoughtfully. “Oh, yes. The soft tissues are all a mess. Your doctor’s right, I’ve seen better work on Earth, they probably could do this better.” 

The prickling intensified even more, and it was now like a bubbling feeling, like hydrogen peroxide fizzing in a wound, only much more so, and deeply internal. John set his teeth and breathed harder. 

“You’re right,” she said, “the bone’s all chipped. I don’t know how much I can do about that, this can’t really generate new tissue, but it can… oh, maybe. Hmm.”

It was kind of burning now, a deep heat that was almost burning-cold, past what his nerves could differentiate, and he caught his breath to avoid making a noise or moving. It was hard to hold still. He couldn’t imagine what was going on. 

“Oh,” Vala purred, sounding pleased, “yes, that’s quite nice. I think it’s working marvellously. But, you know, you’ve kind of fucked-up your back trying to avoid strain on this.” She moved the device over a little, and the heat thrummed through his collarbone, spreading across his spine. “Better. Oh, you have a cracked tooth. Can I fix that?”

John blinked at her, and nodded, and a stab of fire lanced up through his jaw. Vala looked pleased, and he closed his eyes because his shoulder was back down to the prickling but it felt all raw inside, and even as the feeling died down to a tingle it made him want to twitch all over. 

She pulled her hand away a little, and moved down his body, the stone still glowing, as if she were scanning him. “Ah,” she said. “Knees. I find as I age sometimes I have to hit mine pre-emptively. There’s some soft tissue damage in both of these, can I fix that?”

“Please,” John managed through gritted teeth, and the prickling came up to a boil again in the left knee, then the right. He had to struggle for a breath, and hissed inward through his teeth as he did it. The feeling in his shoulder was dying down, though, and he wanted, very badly, to flex it and see whether it were really improved. But she’d said not to move.

Finally she stood back, raising her hand. “Whew,” she said, and sat down in the desk chair. She worked the device off her hand and dropped it back into her suitcase. “There,” she said. “You can move now. How does that feel?”

John pushed himself up, by habit using his right arm, and gingerly rolled his bad shoulder. 

It didn’t hurt.

At all.

“Holy shit,” he said, putting his other hand to the formerly-bad shoulder. The scar was still there, but he could press on it and feel… well, no pain, it just felt like pressing on normal skin. He rubbed his left fingers across his left thumb, and they felt— normal. No tingling. He raised the arm, worked it around in a circle. No hitch or catch; it was better than it had been even before the crossbow, back to how it had been before he’d broken it. “Holy fucking _shit_ , Vala.”

She beamed at him. “I told you,” she said. “The muscles are a little atrophied, and there’s not much I can do about that, but you should be able to take care of that now on your own.”

John shoved to his feet, and he hadn’t realized how much his knees were bothering him before. They didn’t twinge at all. It was like he was twenty again. His whole body was still faintly buzzing. “Holy, holy fuck,” he said, “holy shit, Vala. I didn’t— I didn’t know this was— is this for real?”

“Oh yes,” she said, “and it’s permanent, too. I told you, somehow the SGC keeps forgetting I can do this. You know, I offered to help Colonel Mitchell— you know, he was in that awful accident a few years back? He’s mostly healed, but he still has some trouble with some things, and when there are weather changes sometimes he’s just miserable. And I said I could help him, and he was so suspicious he wouldn’t let me.”

“What a dick,” John said. He got down on his knees on the floor at her feet, mostly because he could, and said, “I’m pretty seriously in your debt.”

She smiled gently, and put out a hand to cup his jaw. “I just wanted you for an ally,” she said. “That’s all I really want.” 

“You need a favor,” he said, “you’ve got my number.”

She smiled. “I have,” she said. “Now be a good boy and don’t go giving away my secrets to just anyone. Unless it’s funny, then you have full license to do anything in the name of a punchline.” 

“You’re something else,” he said, laughing. 

“Come,” she said, “lie down, I’m cold now.”

“You want a snuggle?” he asked. “That’s your price?”

“Yes,” she said. “I was comfortable before.”

He laughed, and got under the covers with her, wrapping himself around her— he was lying on his formerly-bad side, and it didn’t matter, the shoulder had no complaints. “You’re amazing,” he said. 

“Mm,” she said, and fell asleep. John hadn’t expected he’d be able to sleep, but the buzzing in his body subsided into warmth, and he slid off in relatively short order.


	3. Put Your Destructive Powers To Good Use

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Trying my hand at an epistolary style, briefly-- I've gotten sort of instinctive about proper spelling and punctuation so trying to make John not just sound like me was tricky and probably overdone-- but then this degrades into my usual John angst.  
> In which John gets the fallout for The Lemon Incident, and kills six men with his belt knife.

> From: jshep
> 
> To: cmitch
> 
> Subject: vala
> 
>  
> 
> Dude, make friends with her— ignore the wiles— ask her about her Gou’auld healing device—  she can make it so you don’t predict the weather with your ribs anymore & she won’t even make you get naked. You’ve got a goddamn miracle worker looking for an opportunity to get onto your team & you’re turning down her offer of miraculous healing? Get your head checked. 
> 
>  

 

John hit the button to deposit the email into the dump that was set to go with the databurst later that week. He paused to stretch, reveling in the painless motion of his left shoulder. He’d done push-ups until he’d collapsed, earlier. Tomorrow he was hitting the weights, hard. He was _so_ looking forward to it. 

He was sort of not looking forward to explaining things to Carson. Vala had kind of implied she wanted him to keep it a little hush-hush. The look on Carson’s face next time he got John under the scanner was probably going to be hilarious, but the explanations were likely to be a little bit trying. 

Rodney had come back from the mission on a euphoric wave of triumph, which he supposed the guy deserved— to actually blow up an Ori mothership by exploding a Wraith hiveship at it was kind of amazingly awesome, into its own category of awesomeness in fact. And Carter had actually been pretty nice to him, so he obviously had gotten himself under control. He’d still kind of stared at her a lot, but whatever. 

John had looked for Rodney, but he wasn’t in his lab and wasn’t in the mess and wasn’t in his quarters and wasn’t in the seventeenth floor lounge, and that was all the time John had to find him, so in the end he’d gone to dinner alone so there’d be time to eat before his evening meeting.

E-mail it was, then.

 

> From: jshep
> 
> To: rmckay
> 
> Subject: you put your destructive powers to good use this time
> 
>  
> 
> hey i said if you behaved id give you 100 bjs but i didn’t say if you didn’t behave id never speak to you again.  you saved like 2 galaxies I can find it in my heart to give you at least a handjob. hit me up I’m free the rest of the night— i’ll be in my quarters
> 
>  

 

No punctuation and he took extra care to ignore capitalization rules, as was his wont when emailing Rodney. He also made a point of never running spellcheck. When Rodney noticed at all, it wound him up entertainingly. 

He left the laptop open and the email program running and went to take a shower. When he came back, there was a reply from Rodney, so wherever he was, McKay couldn’t be carousing too terribly hard.

 

> From: rmckay
> 
> To: jshep
> 
> Subject: CITRUS TRAITOR 
> 
>  
> 
> What, so you can sneak-attack me with another lemon?
> 
>  

John snorted and sat down, towel-clad, to compose his reply. 

 

> From: jshep
> 
> To: rmckay
> 
> Subject: Re: CITRUS TRAITOR
> 
>  
> 
> man you were talking about dog vaginas in a proffessional meeting i had to give them some way to rein you in

 

He got up and went to get dressed, picking out clean track pants and a clean t-shirt, and scritching absently at his wet hair. He hadn’t even pulled the shirt on when the notification chime sounded, and sure enough, the email was from Rodney.

 

> From: rmckay
> 
> To: jshep
> 
> Subject: Re: CITRUS TRAITOR
> 
>  
> 
> By threatening me with DEATH?? In what twisted corner of your mind could you find something like that amusing???
> 
>  

John sighed, and sat down, pausing to pull his t-shirt over his head before he opened a reply window. There didn’t need to be drama over a goddamn ornamental centerpiece. Really. But before he could even begin to type a reply, another email arrived from Rodney, who could truly type like the wind. Jeez.

 

> From: rmckay
> 
> To: jshep
> 
> Subject: Re: CITRUS TRAITOR
> 
> I have never felt so betrayed. I thought maybe you cared for me, a little bit. I thought maybe at least we were FRIENDS. I never thought you’d find my death AMUSING. I know plenty of people have felt that way but I deluded myself you were different. 

 

Oh my god. John rubbed his face for a moment. _Someone got a drama transplant_ , he thought. _Just what we needed around here_.

 

> From: jshep
> 
> To: rmckay
> 
> Subject: IT WAS MADE OF PLASTIC
> 
> for the love of god mckay it wasnt even a real fucking lemon it was made of plastic it was from a plastic centerpiece someone gave it to me as a joke. You were in no danger even if it was real— Cam Mitchell knows your actually allergic— Sam Carter knows your actually allergic— they’re proffessional, level-headed people & would never actually have endangered your life since they both know— proffessionally— that you are proffessionally indispensable—  even if you were being a complete dickhead to poor Carter who has to put up with enough shit without you being a compelte fucking animal every time she’s in the same goddamn galaxy as you & sometimes even when she’s not
> 
> P.s. you didn’t tell her about the naked halucinatory make outs, did you— please say you didn’t— you totally did i know you did
> 
>  

 

John sent the email before he could think better of it, and got up and walked over toward the balcony door, looking out at the evening sun-speckled sea. He didn’t have to be angry, he thought. He should have himself under better control than that. He was being a goddamn hypocrite. He wanted Rodney to go find himself some kind of serious relationship with someone who deserved him. Being a pathetic harasser of Carter wasn’t anything like that, and was insulting to everyone involved including John, but his very insistence that Rodney could do better was probably a contributing factor to the whole mess, and certainly meant that he had no right to be so miserably twisted up with jealousy inside. 

Not that knowing that helped at all.

 

> From: rmckay
> 
> To: jshep
> 
> Subject Re: IT WAS MADE OF PLASTIC 
> 
> The point is not whether there was real danger but whether I thought there was! Why would you do that to me? 

 

> From: jshep
> 
> To: rmckay
> 
> Subject: Re: IT WAS MADE OF PLASTIC
> 
> why would you so readily believe i would do that to you? 

 

> From: rmckay
> 
> To: jshep
> 
> Subject: Re: IT WAS MADE OF PLASTIC
> 
> Maybe because I’ve been shit on my whole life? Maybe because I’ve been to the hospital over shit like this more than once? Maybe because you don’t give me a whole lot to go on?

 

John stared at the email for a moment. Yes, he knew Rodney had been teased. He’d been teased the same. He knew what it was to never quite trust people, to be always ready to slam the walls back up and pretend, retroactively, that none of the emotion had been real and it had all been nothing, to pretend he’d always known it was a joke. But _you don’t give me a whole lot to go on_ was pretty fucking rich. He’d fucking gotten fucking _shot_ trying to fucking save McKay’s fucking life on more than one fucking occasion. 

Replying to the email was probably a bad idea, John thought dimly, but the entire room was sort of far away and tinny over the rush of blood in his ears. He hit ‘reply’, and changed the subject of the email, and started half a dozen sentences and deleted them. 

 

> From: jshep
> 
> To: rmckay
> 
> Subject: a whole lot to go on 
> 
> nothing i’ve given you has been anything you could go on? 

 

He stared at it for a long moment, deleted it, retyped it, and finally sent it, and immediately regretted it, an itch spreading under his skin everywhere at having exposed himself like that. But a reply came before he could nerve himself up to close the program and go do something, anything else. 

 

> From: rmckay
> 
> To: jshep
> 
> Subject: Re: a whole lot to go on
> 
> Not really. If you’re going to keep that new girlfriend of yours, you’re probably going to have to work on those communication skills. 

 

John blinked, genuinely baffled. New girlfriend. What the fuck was— 

 _Oh_. Vala. 

They’d been seen coming out of her room together, sleep-rumpled, far too late in the morning, as the _Odyssey_ crew had returned from their mission. John hadn’t even thought to be stealthy about it. He’d sort of enjoyed letting people think what they would. They’d gone to the mess hall, and both had eaten ravenously, and somebody had joked that they’d worked up appetites, and John had thought it was funny. He’d especially enjoyed scandalizing Mitchell, who was sort of all right but sort of a blowhard and needed to be scandalized more often. 

And obviously, Rodney didn’t think it was funny. But Jesus. Really. Vala. Rodney was jealous of Vala. The closest thing to a sexual act they’d engaged in was when she’d kissed his cheek goodbye. 

In front of Rodney. _Oh_. 

John gritted his teeth, blindingly furious. That was pretty fucking rich, for McKay to be jealous of Vala after literally panting after Carter for two fucking days in front of everyone. 

 

> From: jshep
> 
> To: rmckay
> 
> Subject: Re: a whole lot to go on
> 
> i’ll take lessons from you in how to comunicate then & make sure to insult her intelligence and reduce her to her physical attributes in every conversation— publicly and in front of the guy I’ve been banging for 2 years — who I’m now totally ignoring and making simultaneously look like a fool and feel like a piece of dog shit — because that was so fucking charming
> 
> for the record NO i didn’t fuck Vala i was in her room so she could use the healing device she got from her host to fix my shoulder so i wont have to go back to Earth for surgery that might not work but i don’t really expect you to care about that its only an injury i got trying to keep them from cutting YOUR fingers off & its only been keeping me awake nights for literally months now thinking my carreer was over and I had nothing left to live for like no big! whatever!
> 
> i don’t think this mode of conversation is particularly productive so i’m shutting my computer down now
> 
>  if you want to talk to me in person i’ve already told you where i am
> 
>  

 

John paced laps of his room for about twenty minutes, went out on the balcony, read the same line of his book fifteen times before he gave up, and finally turned his computer back on. There were no new emails. 

He wished there were private channels on the radios. There were a few different ones, but nothing he could use to have a private long-distance conversation with just one person. Atlantis didn’t have phones. This was stupid and he wasn’t going to apologize for a situation that had largely been caused by Rodney being a complete asshole. 

He wanted to go for a run, but he had one scheduled tomorrow morning with Ronon, and anyway, if he left his quarters now after telling Rodney he’d be here, if Rodney did come by then he’d have lost what high ground he still had. Push-ups were out, since he’d already done enough of them that it was kind of stupid to do more. But he was just too mad to do anything non-physical. 

He paced some more, feeling stupid and twisted-up and miserable. 

When his radio chirped an urgent summons for backup to rescue a stranded offworld team, it was the sweetest music John had ever heard. 

 

 

He dragged himself back up to his quarters about seven hours later, covered in someone else’s blood— several someone elses, actually— and shaking with adrenaline letdown. They’d killed one of the Marines before he’d gotten there— Diaz, a first-year veteran, one of the ones who’d danced in the break battles to Ford’s DJing in the halls in those early days— and John didn’t exactly remember, at the moment, what he’d done to get the rest of the team freed. Everything had been perfectly clear at the time, and he’d felt calm and exhilarated and in perfect control, but everyone had stared at him in mute shock the whole way back to the ‘gate, and he’d puked right before they’d stepped back in to Atlantis’s control room. 

He dropped Diaz’s tags onto his desk, and wiped the back of his arm across his face. He was so filthy it made no difference. Fuck, he was shaking harder now, knees watery. He sat for a moment at his desk, hands on his thighs, trying to get himself together enough to get to the shower. 

The computer chirped, and he gingerly nudged the shift key to wake the display from sleep. It was an email from Heightmeyer, which was just ducky. The subject line was just “Appointment tomorrow— reply to schedule.” Fucking great. John was about to slam the laptop shut but he noticed the previous email, sent a couple of hours earlier, with the subject line “Re: a whole lot to go on”, from Rodney, and before he could stop himself he opened it. 

 

> From: rmckay
> 
> To: jshep
> 
> Subject: Re: a whole lot to go on 
> 
> I’m the closest thing you’ve ever had to a long-term successful relationship, aren’t I.

 

All of John’s rage receptors were burned right out, so he had absolutely nothing to feel at that stunning display of smug condescension. He stared blankly at it for a long moment until the door chime startled him and he realized he’d been drifting. 

He struggled to his feet, worried it might be Lorne or somebody coming to check on him. He really didn’t need that, didn’t need a mother hen-- so he’d lost a guy and killed a bunch of dudes with his ka-bar, like that never happened to anybody else. He’d killed them silently, hadn’t he, and that’s what they’d been after, right, so there wasn’t really any call to be dramatic about it, he was just doing a job. 

When he opened the door, Rodney was standing there, looking smug and collected for the nanosecond it took his eyes to process John’s appearance. Once he’d done that, he leapt back away from the door with a rather shrill exclamation of disgust. “Oh my God, Sheppard,” he said, “what the hell is wrong with you?”

“Rescue mission went kinda bad,” John said unsteadily. 

“Is that your blood?” Rodney asked, sheet-white and horrified. John stepped back from the door, and Rodney pursued him, catching at his arm.

“No,” John said, “none of it’s mine, I’m fine.”

“You’re shaking,” Rodney said. 

“Adrenaline,” John said. “Adrenaline crash. It’s fine. Go away.” 

“You look like you’re about to fall over,” Rodney said, totally ignoring his words, grabbing his elbow and steering him to the chair. “Sit down before you fall.”

“I’m fine,” John said, exasperated, but it came out kind of flat.

“Seriously,” Rodney said, “this is a shitload of blood, what the hell happened to you?”

John closed his eyes. “You remember how after that storm I stitched your arm, and threw up and passed out?”

“Yes,”  Rodney said. 

“I’m gonna do that second part,” John said, and lurched to his feet and into the bathroom. 

He puked in the toilet/recycler thing, noting distractedly that he was smearing blood on everything he touched and it was going to be a nightmare to clean it. Eventually his stomach got the memo that it was empty and the dry heaving wasn’t in any way useful, and he shoved himself away and sat with his back against the wall, panting to catch his breath. 

Rodney was standing in the doorway, and came over to offer him a cup of water. “Should I tell Carson?”

“He just finished checkin’ me over,” John said, taking the cup and rinsing his mouth. His body was heavy, leaden, and leaning over to spit in the recycler was almost more than he could manage, but he did. “I’m fine, Rodney.”

“Right,” Rodney said. He hovered a moment, and John closed his eyes and carefully, carefully sipped at the cup of water, daring a swallow only after holding the water in his mouth for long enough that it was lukewarm. 

Something touched John’s foot, and he blinked. Rodney was untying his boots. John let him, too leaden to resist. Left to his own devices he’d probably pass out on the bathroom floor and wake up pretty miserable tomorrow, so he might as well take Rodney’s help. 

Rodney moved up and crouched beside him. John had peeled out of his tac vest and had left his BDU tunic in the ready room, so he was only wearing his t-shirt and trousers. He’d left his sidearm and holster down there too, knowing the weapons needed cleaning urgently and that the armory tech on duty would take care of it. 

“Was it that bad?” Rodney asked quietly. 

“No,” John said, “I’m just tired.” He closed his eyes. “Adrenaline takes a lot out of you afterward.”

“C’mon,” Rodney said. “Let’s get you into the shower. You can’t go to bed like that and you’re not sleeping on the bathroom floor.”

John nodded, and wearily shoved himself up. He absent-mindedly used his left arm, and it trembled and nearly gave out. Rodney caught him under the arm, grimacing with distaste as this smeared his clothing with blood as well. “Careful,” Rodney said. “Don’t hurt yourself worse.”

“Wasn’t lying,” John said. “Shoulder’s better.” He hauled himself up, steadying himself against Rodney’s familiar solid body. “Muscles are just weak.”

“Hmm,” Rodney said, and unfastened John’s belt. He hit the shower controls and started the water going, as hot as it would safely let him. John struggled out of his shirt, and turned his left shoulder toward Rodney. 

“See,” John said. He moved his arm, poked at the scar. “She used a Gou’auld hand device on me. She’s had it the whole time, and the SGC knows that and hasn’t even thought to ask her to use it.”

“Really,” Rodney said, interest piqued. 

“Yeah,” John said, unbuttoning his BDU trousers. “We work for a bunch of morons.” He stepped out of the trousers, shucked his boxers— even they had blood on them, which was kind of amazing— and stepped into the shower. 

It was on full heat and full blast, and he stepped under the spray and scrubbed at his face and watched the water run pink to the drain. Better, better— it beat some of the sick rage-hangover out of him, pulling him back into his own skin. 

When a hand touched his back he startled, nearly slipped, and caught himself, flattening his back against the wall. Rodney. It was just Rodney, naked, steadying him with gentle hands. “You’re sure none of this blood is yours?” Rodney asked. 

“Sure,” John said, and blinked. “I mean, I’m sure.” 

Rodney gave him a soft, amused smile, and wrapped a washcloth around a shred of soap, pressing John back against the warm metal wall with a broad hand against the front of his shoulder, and using the other hand to scrub the soapy cloth across John’s chest, up his neck, down his belly, across his hip and down his thigh. John tipped his head back and closed his eyes and let Rodney work. Rodney finished soaping him up by taking first one hand, then the other, and scrubbing each finger individually with the rough soapy washcloth, getting the filth and blood out of the creases of his skin, even scrubbing around his fingernails. 

It was soothing, grounding, but sort of unnervingly intimate, the close attention lavished on every part of John seeming such a shocking extravagance. Sex was easy; even when it wasn’t at all impersonal, it still had the plausible excuse of being for the other person’s gratification. But this, this kind of care, this wasn’t getting Rodney off.

Maybe it was assuaging his guilt, though. It might be apology. John opened his eyes and watched Rodney working. Was that what it was? Was Rodney aware of what a complete asshole he’d been? John hadn’t had the capacity to process that last email before, and still didn’t; he only had enough dim comprehension to recognize that as far as wildly insulting and off-base assumptions went, it was a real doozy. But he was too tired to puzzle it out, too wrung-out to think about it. 

Rodney scrubbed the soap through John’s pubic hair, made a desultory pass down John’s dick. John twitched, shivered, pulled away a little— sex was probably the very last thing he could handle at the moment. Rodney looked up under his eyebrows, unmistakably hopeful, and John looked blankly back. He didn’t want to fuck, didn’t want to mess around, didn’t even want to make out, but he didn’t want Rodney to leave either, didn’t want him to stop touching him.

Despite himself he made the connection of what Rodney had said: Rodney didn’t think John was capable of sustaining an actual relationship. Why would he get involved with John, if he thought that? The answer was sort of bleak, but sort of unsurprising: because that wasn’t what he was in this for. Just sex didn’t really require your co-participant to be capable of real relationships. 

And it was John who had all along been insisting that that’s all this was. Maybe he’d realized it all along, then, and so Rodney thought he was only pointing out the obvious. And maybe it was true; sure, John had been with Nancy seven years, but that didn’t mean he was capable of that kind of thing anymore. He was pretty fucking broken, after all. 

John shivered, put his arm out and pulled Rodney close against himself, letting Rodney pin him to the wall. Rodney made a happy little noise and wriggled against him, quite obviously turned-on and, it was pretty apparent, considering himself forgiven. He licked hot little kisses all down the side of John’s neck, bit his collarbone, ran his hand up John’s side, which were all things John was vaguely aware that he usually responded well to. 

Hell, he usually responded well to pretty much anything Rodney did. And what was the point of being finicky? Either he wanted Rodney or he didn’t. Beggars couldn’t be choosers. He shivered again as Rodney rubbed his half-hard dick against John’s hip. It was too much, it was like his skin was burning off, like the knife he’d violated six men’s arteries with was doing the same to his flesh now, like he was just so much meat, and he was afraid, utterly terrified, of being left alone for even a moment to contemplate it. 

Shit, Rodney had pulled back from him, had noticed that his whole body had gone stiff except the one part that should have been. John bit the insides of his lips until they bled, trying to wrench out just a little more control, ten more goddamn minutes of acting normal, and maybe if he got Rodney off he could sleep in his bed with him and not be alone with how broken he was. But that was it, he didn’t have it in him. 

“Sheppard,” Rodney said, worried, and it burned— Rodney knew John’s fucking name, and never fucking used it, and almost two fucking years of sustained and deliberate effort not to let that bother him gaped open like knife-wounds now, big stinging gaps between his ribs. 

“‘Msorry,” John said, teeth clenched so they didn’t chatter. “‘Mokay.” He wanted to put his arms around Rodney again, wanted to feel the warmth of a living body and put that between him and the cold of death, but it was— well, it wasn’t what Rodney had come here for, and if you were going to stab six men you kind of had to expect it was going to cost you something, at the very least tonight’s sleep, and if you couldn’t keep your shit together long enough to give a guy a simple handjob you kind of had to expect you’d wind up spending the night alone. 

“Sheppard,” Rodney said, “you’re shaking, are you cold?”

“I stabbed six guys,” John said, “like they were animals, it triggered the fuck out of me because I’m fucking crazy, Rodney. I’m not cold.” He thought the shower off and slid down the wall until he was sitting on the floor, shuddering hard. 

Rodney moved away and John grimly set about getting himself to his feet. He wasn’t going to sleep alone on the floor of his shower. If for no other reason than when the nightmares woke him he’d probably hurt himself running into the wall or something in the unfamiliar space. 

He hauled himself over the lip of the shower stall and dragged himself awkwardly to his feet, bracing himself against the bathroom wall. The shuddering eased, slowly, and he let his breath hiss between his teeth, forcing it back to as close to normal as he could manage. 

Movement startled him— Rodney was standing there with a towel. He grabbed John and steadied him. “Whoa there,” he said. 

“Thought you left,” John said blankly. Rodney frowned at him, and wrapped the towel around him. 

“You thought I’d leave you like this?” Rodney asked. “No, I was grabbing a spare towel from your closet. Why would I leave you like this? You can hardly stand up.”

John burrowed into the towel— it was one of the really big ones, beach-towel-sized, that the then-quartermaster had made him after the Crone incident. She’d meant it as a joke but he’d always loved them. They were just so stupidly indulgent. And by God, he’d earned them. “I dunno,” John said, coming back to himself a little bit, “you apparently had no problem believing I’d cavalierly have you assassinated for a prank, I don’t think it’s so farfetched for me to think you’d leave when I started acting nuts.” 

Rodney’s chin went up, and John spared a grim exhausted thought that it was a poor choice of times to revive this argument. “I can see how you might think I was overreacting,” he said, with his overly-precise I’m-hurt diction, “but, I’ll have you know—“

“I know,” John said. “Rodney. I know. I fucking know.” He moved toward the bathroom door, wavering, as steady as he could still manage which wasn’t very. “I hadn’t realized you still think I’d— but I guess there were a bunch of things I hadn’t realized, so, y’know. Live and learn.” 

“That’s not fair,” Rodney said, following him out into the bedroom. 

John shook his head, having to pause as the movement unbalanced him. He managed a wobbling line across the floor, and sat down heavily on the edge of his bed. Rodney followed, and stood in front of him, arms crossed defensively over his bare chest. 

“I wasn’t always like this,” John said, and it came out plaintive. “I wasn’t born crazy. I wasn’t always broken.” It hurt to talk, hurt to acknowledge it. “There used to be enough of me.” 

Rodney didn’t say anything or make a sound for a long time, but John’s head was too heavy to look up at him. Finally Rodney said, “Enough for what?”

John shook his head. His eyes had sunk shut and he couldn’t pry them open again. 

The bed dipped— Rodney sitting down, probably— John couldn’t turn his head to see. “John,” Rodney said, very quietly, and it melted something loose between his ribs. “Are you going to be okay if I leave you?”

John choked on whatever it was that had melted, and made a strangled little noise. He bit it off ruthlessly, as the pathetic poor showing it was. Of course he wasn’t going to be fucking okay if Rodney left him, but he didn’t really have any fucking choice in the matter, had no right to make any demands. He pulled himself as together as he could get, curling in on himself more to do it. “I,” he tried, “yeah, I— fine.”

“Liar,” Rodney said, and wrapped his arms around John from behind, pulling him down into the bed and under the covers. 


	4. Scar Tissue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A short-ish follow up to the previous chapter: John talks to Heightmeyer, who has a love affair with metaphors.

 

“Ah,” Heightmeyer said, gesturing him in. “Come, sit, just give me a minute.” She was behind her desk, gathering something up. John peered over, curiosity pulling him out of his dark sulk. He’d woken up alone, quite cold and very sore and feeling almost hung-over, and had not responded with either warmth or eagerness to Heightmeyer’s politely-worded reminder that he needed to check in with her at his earliest convenience today.

She was sweeping up broken glass. A picture frame had fallen and shattered, though from the angle, it had perhaps been thrown. 

“So you’ve had a great morning too,” John said, backing off and sauntering over to the couch. “I hope it wasn’t one of my guys who threw that.”

“It doesn’t matter who it was,” she said, emptying the dustpan into a plastic bag with a tinkling noise. She set the broken frame on the edge of her desk. “Although I will say, the loss of Cpl. Diaz has been hard for a lot of people, especially on top of last month’s disaster. That was why I emailed you so promptly.”

“Of course,” John said, smiling tightly. “I’m sure that was the whole of it.” _Last month’s disaster_ was a really understated way of mentioning the near-invasion of Earth by life-sucking space vampires. Undoubtedly it had been traumatic for everyone, but John really didn’t envy whoever was doing psychotherapy for the crew of the _Daedalus_.

She pulled her notebook out of her desk drawer and came to sit across from him, tucking her feet underneath herself in the soft upholstered chair. She looked a little less flawless than normal, somehow, and John narrowed his eyes at her, trying to pinpoint it. Her hair was a little frizzy, not nearly so carefully-styled as normal; she looked tired, despite her heavier-than-normal makeup. Ah. She must not have slept well. “Well,” she said. “I’m afraid you traumatized at least one of the guys you rescued.”

“I’m out of practice at silent-kill techniques,” John said lightly. Kate regarded him levelly. “Okay, fine, I actually don’t remember some of what I did out there, and I had a pretty brutal PTSD episode afterward. Fair enough. Kate, Diaz was first-year, he and I went back, he used to dance when Ford DJ’d. I can’t remember the last time I was so angry. Those fuckers killed him for sport. That was stupid, and I taught them a lesson, and I probably took it too far.”

Kate breathed in slowly, breathed out heavily, not anything quite so unprofessional as a sigh but an unmistakable sign of weariness and slight dread of an upcoming difficult task. She was definitely tired. “How bad was last night’s episode?” she asked. “Did you harm yourself or anyone else?”

“If it was going to come to that I would have called you or someone else equipped to handle it,” John said, as neutral as he could manage. “I threw up in my shower and made Rodney nervous. That’s as bad as it got.”

“Did you threaten him?” Kate asked. 

“I would never do that,” John said, neutrality fading to a hard edge. 

“He seems to think you would,” Kate said. 

“I know,” John said. “I talked to him about it. It was a plastic fucking lemon, Doc.”

“He was very upset,” she said. 

“Oh,” John said, “believe me, I know.” He shook his head. “I’m not really here to talk about Rodney McKay.”

“You and he are quite close, though,” Kate said. 

John considered that. “He’s probably… _told_ you… some things,” he said carefully. 

“I can’t really discuss what we’ve talked about,” Kate said. 

“Of course not,” John said, “but given that there are things I wouldn’t strictly consider myself at liberty to _tell_ you, it would make this easier if we could admit I knew he had.”

Kate tipped her head back, sucking her breath in slowly, considering. “I see,” she said, and it was so cagily said, it was impossible to know what conclusion she was drawing, what she’d already known, what she now thought she understood. Jesus, he hated talking to her. If he weren’t so goddamn exhausted he would never have said anything. As it was, he’d sort of just come out to her, and probably should have been freaking out, except that the bits of him that did the freaking out were kind of burned-out at the moment.

“I gave Cam Mitchell a fake lemon to threaten McKay with,” John said, “because I was both mortally embarrassed as his team leader, and personally jealous as someone… particularly _close_ to him, at his behavior in the presence of Sam Carter. He made a complete ass of himself ogling her and saying crude and condescending things to her. I figured a phony citrus fruit would be an appropriate level of disapproval to register.” 

“He didn’t take it well,” Kate said. 

“Yeah,” John said, squinting. “I know. I heard all about it.” 

“Just out of curiosity,” Kate said, “was this before or after the rescue mission?”

“Oh,” John said, “before. After… well, I tried to hold a conversation, but mostly I just threw up and fell over a lot.”

“McKay came by, though,” Kate said. “To check up on you.”

John looked at his hands. The nails were clean. Rodney had cleaned them. “Yeah,” he said. “I think he came by to yell at me but I was pretty clearly not in any condition to hear it.”

“You were clearly upset, then?” she prompted.

“Oh,” John said, “well, it’s more that I was covered head to toe in other people’s blood, I think, that tipped him off, but the puking shortly after that probably clued him in too.” He bit his lip, looking to see that there was no dirt ground into his palms like there often was nowadays. Rodney had scrubbed them better than he usually thought to. “He, um. He’s probably mentioned that he sometimes… Well. I know he’s told you he’s been around when I’ve had flashbacks and things. He sort of knows what to do now. He… even when we’re not on otherwise very good terms he’s usually decent enough to help out. If he stays with me I don’t remember the nightmares.” He glanced up; Kate was looking at her notepad, nodding along, not writing. She knew that, then. “I know he’s got to have told you a fair bit about that. He stayed until I fell asleep last night, at least.” John rubbed the back of his neck. “It helped.”

“Good,” she said. “It seems you have a beneficial friendship, there.”

John nodded, looked away. “Well,” he said. “I don’t honestly know what he gets out of it.”

“You don’t?” Kate asked. 

John really, really, really wasn’t in the mood for therapist prompting at the moment. He blew his breath out through his lips, chewed them a bit. “No,” he said. “Really, no.”

“You don’t think you have anything to offer,” she said, “in friendship or in anything more.”

“The last thing he sent to me,” John said, “probably while I was out on that rescue mission, was a snippy email theorizing that he was the closest thing I’d ever had to a long-term relationship.”

Kate raised both eyebrows. “You think he was right?” she asked. 

John stared at her. “I was married for seven years,” he said. “No, he’s not right. It was an incredibly arrogant and condescending thing to say, was the point I was making. But _you_ think he’s right.”

“I didn’t say that,” she said. 

“No,” John said, “you expected _me_ to. But there’s the thing. He probably knows me better than anyone else does, at this point, and that’s what he thinks. I know he’s read my file, I know he knows I’m divorced. He knows me that well, and incidentally it’s not like you don’t know me at all, and he thinks… what? That it was a sham? It was a phony marriage? It was one of those Britney Spears kinda dealies? And you think I think he’s right.” Kate opened her mouth, closed it, and wrote something. “That’s pretty fucked-up.”

“You’ve never mentioned your wife,” Kate pointed out. 

“No,” John said. “She broke my fuckin’ heart, and while I know I talk about my feelings all the time, that particular topic of discussion somehow seems to have slipped my mind. I know you know how much I love dredging that kind of shit up.”

“You once said that everyone you’d ever loved had died or left,” Kate said. “I remember that now, and I hadn’t really given it much thought, but I suppose you were including her in that.”

“Yeah,” John said, “pretty much.”

“So you hold McKay at a distance because you expect he’ll leave you too,” Kate went on.

John blinked. “I what?”

“You hold him at a distance,” Kate said. “You insist it’s not a real relationship.”

John chewed on his lip a moment. “Well,” he said. “It can’t be.”

“Why not?” Kate asked. 

“I need him professionally more than I need him personally,” John said. “And I’ll never be able to acknowledge him publicly; if I did, it would end my career, and then I’d be stuck on Earth and he’d be here so there wouldn’t really be anything to acknowledge, so it’s kind of… futile. Either I have it and can’t acknowledge it, or I admit it and lose it, and those are my only two options.”

“And not acknowledging him publicly means it’s not a real relationship,” Kate said. 

He hunched his shoulders. “He’s had other people, lovers or whatever, who wanted to keep their association with him a secret because they were ashamed to admit they were involved with him,” John said quietly. “He told me this like it was no big deal but come on. What kind of a piece of shit sleeps with someone they’re ashamed of?” He looked up at her. “Oh. Me. Nice.”

“So you are ashamed,” Kate said. 

“No,” John said, annoyed. “God. No. But in effect, as far as Rodney’s concerned, is there any difference? Either way, I won’t admit to him in public. I _can’t_ , but that’s not really any different from _won’t_. When it comes right down to it.” He shrugged. “So, I say again— I don’t know what he could possibly be getting out of this.”

“Being with you couldn’t be its own reward,” Kate said. “It can’t be worth anything to him unless it’s something publicly acknowledged.”

John squinted at her. “You’re making some sort of conclusion about my sense of self-worth here,” he said, “which is a fine and noble thing for you to do, but it’s probably a lot less interesting than you’re making it out to be, and I sort of feel like a more pressing issue is the fact that PTSD is probably going to drive me batshit insane in pretty short order if I don’t come up with better coping mechanisms than what I got right now.”

Kate stared at him, in that cocked-head, doe-eyed way she sometimes did, her face sort of creepily fixed into a pleasantly neutral, slightly concerned expression. She was quite good, hard to fully read, but John had, over the years, started to suspect that this was the face she put on when she was re-evaluating her strategy. Or, perhaps, recalibrating the strategy she’d already committed to, was more like it. She reached some internal conclusion, tilted her head back to straight, and tapped her pencil on her notepad. 

“John,” she said. “I’m just going to try to lay out your situation, so that hopefully you can think of it more clearly and constructively.”

“I think I understand my situation,” John said, skeptical. 

“More specifically,” she said, “your psychological situation. You have PTSD, yes, and we’ve already discussed that extensively. But more generally. Let’s get sort of metaphorical here, okay?”

“I love metaphors,” John said, deeply insincere.

“There’s a poetic belief that scar tissue is stronger, tougher, more durable than the original tissue was before the injury that caused it,” Kate said. “Under some circumstances, and with a bit of a stretch of the imagination, this can apply to psychological trauma as well. Where you have been damaged by these traumas, to an extent you have already developed the skills you need to get through them and hold together.”

“I feel like that’s not true,” John said.

“Let me finish, though,” Kate said. “You hold yourself together as well as you do because you have this scar tissue you can rely on, which can take more abuse than unscarred tissue.”

“Which is why I break down and throw up in my shower,” John concluded.

She stared at him over the edge of her notepad and it irked him that he couldn’t tell whether she were peeved or not. Well, he was peeved; her metaphor was crap.

“John,” she said gently, and she had only really started using his name like that pretty recently, gently like it was a fragile thing. “The things that make you break down like that are things that would make anyone break down, and probably more permanently. I don’t know if you understand what an extraordinary amount of pressure you’re under, here. This isn’t normal.”

He frowned at her. “What?”

“You complain that your PTSD is making you break down,” Kate said. “But I’ve had plenty of people in here with entirely new PTSD diagnoses caused by the same episodes you’re writing off as simply triggers. John, whatever damage you’ve previously sustained is basically nothing compared to what everyone’s undergoing now, as we speak. What happened last night was an incredibly traumatic event for at least a dozen people, and you bore the brunt of it. You think throwing up in your shower and needing your closest friend to stay with you until you fell asleep is a ‘brutal PTSD episode’? I was up all night dealing with a couple of the other guys who came back from that mission with you; two of them are under sedation in the infirmary right now and a third, I’ve left under observation.”

“Who?” John demanded, and as it sank in, he said, quieter, “Because of what I did?”

Kate shook her head. “I’ll have a report for you on the affected Marines if I think there will be any lasting issues,” she said. “I won’t be making that report right now, we’re in the middle of your evaluation and it’s not appropriate. But no, Colonel, it’s not because of what you did, it’s because of what they went through generally— witnessing Cpl. Diaz’s murder, the stress and terror of a mission gone wrong, the rest of it. It’s not your fault, I do believe you handled it as well as anyone could have, and the ones who came back relatively free from trauma did so because your actions provided, if nothing else, a strong sense of closure. Feeling like you’ve ‘won’ an encounter like that can go a long way to allay the feelings of helplessness that are really what fundamentally underpin PTSD.” 

John needed a moment to digest that. “Feelings of helplessness are what fundamentally underpin PTSD,” he said. It wasn’t a new concept but he hadn’t heard it said quite so clearly before. 

Kate nodded. “It’s not seeing horrible things that leads to lasting trauma,” Kate said. “It’s experiencing horrible things you have no power to escape or avoid or stop or overcome. This is why we’re finding that even victims of emotional abuse, or similar non-physical forms of trauma, have just as severe symptoms as, say, victims of violent assault.” 

“I think I knew that,” John said. “I feel like we’ve talked about that.”

“We have,” Kate said. “And part of the reason you hold yourself together as well as you do is that you have a job that you are very good at that allows you to use your considerable talents to their fullest extent on a fairly regular basis, and allows you to use the hypervigilance that is probably the worst symptom most people have of PTSD as a survival tactic. So you have a pretty good, constant outlet for that, and don’t have to feel helpless much of the time. What worries me is that if your shoulder injury worsens and you have to leave active service, there won’t be anything keeping you fulfilled in that way.”

“I have thought of that,” John said, “but I think the shoulder’s going to be okay, actually.”

“Really,” Kate said. “I hadn’t heard that. Well, I hope you’re correct.” She smiled warmly, though there was something slightly formulaic about it. “Getting back to where I was going with the scar tissue metaphor, there’s a second thing. Scars are made of collagen, and have to be constantly regenerated from the inside. Sometimes if a patient is malnourished or very sick, their old wounds will re-open, because their body is too weak to keep making the collagen that holds the scars closed from the inside.”

“So you’re sayin’ I’m eventually gonna crack under the strain,” John concluded for her. 

She tilted her head, eyes a little too wide for innocence. “I’m not saying that at all,” she said. 

He gave her an eyebrow raise and sat back to wait. She spent a moment contemplating him, infuriatingly, then gave him a strangely sad smile. “I’m saying that even with all the damage you’ve survived over the years, and are continually sustaining even as I’ve been working with you, you’re as strong as, or stronger than, you ever were. It’s just that in order to remain so, you have to get enough nourishment. You have to continually make sure that you’re getting what you need, so that you can keep holding those scars closed from the inside.” She shook her head, leaning forward a little. “I think you’re doing a fine job at managing your condition, John,” she said. “And I’ve consistently reported that, of you. You are unusual in that you’re both very strong and very flexible. You have a phenomenal survival instinct. People always seem to think you’ve got some kind of death wish, but I don’t think that’s true at all. You know exactly what you need to survive, and you’ll do what’s necessary. But I think your downfall, if it comes, will be that you’ve starved yourself until you can’t hold your scars closed anymore. I don’t think you can be destroyed from the outside, John Sheppard.” 

John looked at his watch. Damn it. Close, though. “Sooo,” he said. “You’re sayin’ I’m eventually gonna crack under the strain.”

Kate actually laughed, and her normal facade cracked enough that she rubbed her face, which was something she never did. She unfolded her legs, setting her feet on the floor, and slumped a little before straightening back up. “Notice that isn’t what I said,” she said. 

“No, you went on for about four minutes about spiritual nourishment,” he said. “Before reaching the same conclusion I did.”

“There’s a crucial difference, though,” Kate said. “You think it’s inevitable. I think there’s a good chance it’ll never happen. If you just let yourself have real relationships and let yourself get what you need from those relationships, I think it won’t. You have more to offer than a willingness to either kill or die for the people you love. If you can find it in yourself to _live_ , instead, then you will. I just think you need to learn to accept love in return, in order to keep on being as strong as you are.”

“Huh,” John said. She’d lost him pretty irrevocably at spiritual nourishment. “I’ll get right on that.”

“I’m serious, Colonel Sheppard,” Heightmeyer said, abandoning her normal air of detachment and showing real frustration. It was kind of a victory. Too bad that scoring victory over one’s shrink was pretty much the textbook definition of hollow. 

“I’m never not serious,” John answered tiredly.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sheppard knows what Rodney likes. 
> 
> Episode tag to Irresistible.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ohmygod this chapter took me forever to write. I am sorry, Rodney, but you had to do this. It wasn’t easy to go through with it and I tried lots of ways of getting around it but it wrecks the point if I do. So… Trigger warnings for noncon/dubcon. I just— this episode was so incredibly problematic in canon and was dismissed as a fucking joke. Somebody’s gotta understand just how fucking dark this really was.

By the time Rodney made his grumbling way back to his quarters to change out of his grubby uniform and retrieve the tablet with his notes about further gate-scouting on it, he’d sort of forgotten about his last conversation with Sheppard. What with all the hullabaloo about getting rid of the last samples of Lucius’s herb, even a brilliant mind like Rodney’s couldn’t be faulted for momentarily forgetting that he’d already ingested some and Sheppard was the only person who hadn’t been given the antidote. 

So when he opened the door to his quarters and discovered that they were spotlessly tidy, he thought he’d been robbed. Except that wasn’t the sort of thing that happened, on Atlantis. But all his clutter was gone. The bed was made, all the laundry was gone from the floor, the magazines near the bed had been tidied into a crate. The throw rug was lint-free and perfectly straight next to the bed, which had clean sheets with hospital corners, perfectly turned-down, blankets folded neatly at the foot of the bed and pillows fluffed at the head. The balled-up tissues were gone from the nightstand, which gleamed gently in the afternoon light— every surface had been dusted, some scrubbed, all wiped down. 

“Oh my God,” Rodney said, as his panic faded and memory returned. _Shit._ Sheppard was gonna be _pissed_ when this wore off. 

As if summoned, Sheppard appeared from the bathroom. He was wearing— Rodney boggled. He was wearing nothing but that pair of American flag boxer-briefs that he’d been so mortified to be forced to [strip down into on P4X-C56](http://archiveofourown.org/works/954808) for their welcome ritual. Rodney hadn’t known he still owned those; there’d been a whole big stink about the illicit picture Ford had snapped of the then-major in his underwear (full body shot from behind, Sheppard just starting to turn, the light falling just so along the star-spangled curve of one pert asscheek, the firm bulge of muscle down the back of one thigh), and to piss Sheppard off Rodney had made it the wallpaper of all three of the laptops on his desk (two zoomed out to show the full picture, one zoomed in on Sheppard’s starry, perky ass). Back then he hadn’t known Sheppard was even occasionally gay, so he’d been trying to avoid making his crush on the guy obvious, but when he was alone he’d spent an embarrassing amount of time jerking off to that picture. 

He hadn’t realized Sheppard knew that. Or maybe this was a lucky guess. 

“Hi,” Sheppard said, and he was weirdly wide-eyed and earnest. _Shit._ Shit shit shit, the effects hadn’t worn off. Rodney really needed to call Carson and get Sheppard a dose of the antidote, or this was going to get awkward. 

But it was already awkward, Rodney realized, and then his brain shut down because Sheppard knelt at his feet and gazed up at him adoringly. “I got you lunch,” Sheppard said, hands twisting at his midsection like he was nervous. 

The afternoon sun was slanting in the windows, and it was exceedingly kind to Sheppard, even though the man hardly needed the kindness— it painted gold across the long planes of his torso, picked red glints from the spikes of his dark hair, set his eyes glowing green with bronze flecks around the pupil, and he looked like some sort of deity, perhaps from the mythology of a people who idolized a finely-cut jaw, whose gods spoke to them from perfect, lush mouths. 

“Did you now,” Rodney said, all higher brain functions offline. 

“It’s on the desk,” Sheppard said, almost anxiously. “I got Adina to give me a second blue Jell-o cup. You know how she is.”

Adina was a mess hall tyrant, and doubled as a military administrator; she was tireless, sharp as a razor, and absolutely merciless to food-hoarders. She and Rodney got into it sometimes and it never, ever went Rodney’s way. He’d learned that the only way to subvert her rationing was to send minions to cadge additional desserts. She’d grown wise to the tactic, however, and tended to be suspicious of lower-ranked scientists. 

But Sheppard, she liked Sheppard. He was her boss and treated her well, spoke up for her in meetings, publicly thanked her and all the quartermaster and administrative staff for their work. They all loved him and never turned him down for anything. But Rodney could rarely get him to use his powers for evil. Virtually unfettered access the man had, to any supplies or food or trade goods, and he almost never got extra desserts for Rodney. 

Rodney argued with Sheppard sometimes about the proper care and treatment of minions. Secretly he had to admit that Sheppard’s approach, of praise and positive motivation, seemed to be pretty effective. But _his_ minions were mostly competent. _Rodney’s_ were idiots. And no matter what, he couldn’t ever remember their names.

And on the few occasions, early on in his career, when he had bothered, most of them had turned on him at their first opportunity, but he was damned if he was going to ever admit that to Sheppard. Better to rule in fear than try to rule in love, because that way when they turned on you, as they always did, it hurt a lot less.

Sheppard was creeping him out, watching him anxiously and chewing on his lip. Creeping him out and turning him on, was the problem; the man had obviously just gotten out of the shower, hair still a little damp, and he looked good enough to eat. “Do you like it?” Sheppard asked, a little worried, casting a nervous glance at the desk. “I could get something else.”

“Oh,” Rodney said, “it’s fine, thank you. I, um—“ He really needed to get out of here and get that antidote before things got out of hand. An extra Jell-O, he’d take, and actually this wasn’t the first time Sheppard had cleaned his quarters (though it was definitely the most obsessively), but the underpants were taking it a bit far.

“I know what you like,” Sheppard said. “I pretend I don’t pay attention but really I do. So, you know, you don’t even have to ask. I know what you like.”

“You know what I like,” Rodney said blankly. 

Sheppard smiled shyly, an utterly alien look on his face, and stood up and stepped back a couple of paces to gesture at the desk. “I know you like the blue Jell-O. I know you like the green not-tatoes best, and you always put almost-butter on them, and salt. And I know you prefer the end cut from the roast beast, and you like the rolls with the poppyseeds better than the plain ones. You almost never take any of the beans unless you’re constipated, which I don’t think you are because you would be grumpier. So I got you some of the sort of artichokes because I don’t know if you like them or not, we haven’t had them before but they look kind of like the thing we ate on P56-3G1 that you had seconds of.”

“Wow,” Rodney said. Then, in a moment, “I don’t remember P56-3G1.”

“Of course you do,” Sheppard said. “You always remember the ones that feed us. It was last winter.”

“That was a long time ago,” Rodney said. “You remember what I liked that long ago?”

“I remember everything,” Sheppard said earnestly, without the slightest trace of sarcasm. “Everything about you.”

“That’s creepy,” Rodney said, and Sheppard’s face fell. He looked down, almost cartoonishly stricken, and Rodney immediately felt like a total jerk. “I don’t mean you’re creepy! I mean that’s creepy that your memory is that good.”

“I’ve always been kind of weird,” Sheppard admitted, still looking genuinely upset. He looked away, arms folded across his chest. “I’ll remember that you don’t like that. I kinda thought you might not, that’s why I never let on before.” 

“No,” Rodney said, repentant, “no, Sheppard, there’s nothing about you I don’t like. Don’t look like that.” He grabbed Sheppard’s arms, trying to get him to look happy again. 

Sheppard gave him a brittle smile. “I know other things you like,” he said, and slipped smoothly out of Rodney’s grasp to go back to his knees. “I know you think about me like this. I know you think about tying me up. You think about kinky shit, sometimes, and I know you do, and I never let you do it. But I know better, now.” He was staring up at Rodney, pupils a little dilated now, breath coming a little faster. “I know how to make you happy. And if I keep my mouth busy, maybe I won’t say anything else creepy.”

“Sheppard, that’s—“ Rodney began, but Sheppard pulled him down into the chair and straddled his lap, kissing him hard, and within about twenty seconds Rodney had completely forgotten why at some point he’d considered objecting to this. Sheppard was warm and eager and smelled of shampoo and aftershave, and tasted of toothpaste, and Rodney could feel him getting hard, hot against his belly, as he ground his ass down against Rodney’s crotch. 

“I know you want to tie me down,” Sheppard said, low and hot in Rodney’s ear. “I know you want to gag me. I know you’d get off on that. I know you think about things like that. And it’s really selfish of me never to let you try any of that stuff.”

“How do you know that?” Rodney asked, shocked. He’d never said anything of the sort; he’d spent too long watching former-bug-Sheppard panic at the medical restraints to ever seriously consider tying him to a bedpost. It was just something he sometimes idly fantasized about. Kind of a lot, now that he thought of it. Wow, Sheppard was observant.

“You hold me down sometimes, especially when you’re close,” Sheppard said, “and I go through your porn folder every so often.”

“You do?” Rodney was really astonished, now.

“You showed me how to get in,” Sheppard said, frowning. “I figured you wanted me to. Kinda thought it was meant as a hint.”

“I did?” Rodney dimly remembered, oh yes, being in another room and wanting to access his home laptop. He’d showed Sheppard how it worked, because the man had been leaning on his shoulder at the time and had asked what he was doing, but hadn’t figured he’d understood more than one word in three. “I did. No, it wasn’t meant to be a hint.”

“Oh,” Sheppard said. He shrugged, and wriggled thrillingly in Rodney’s lap. “Well, I did. And you have a lot of bondage on there. And while you got off like crazy that time I tied you down, I’m pretty sure you want to try it the other way.”

“I, ah,” Rodney said, and most of his blood was in his dick now, “um, holy shit, Sheppard, are you—“

“I want it,” Sheppard said, “Rodney, anything, I want it, God.” 

“Anything,” Rodney said, and Sheppard kissed him, hard and deep and urgent, then pulled away, got out of his lap, and grabbed his hands, towing him toward the bed. 

“C’mon,” Sheppard said, and picked up a pair of military-issue handcuffs off the foot of the bed. “I’ll be your sex slave. Treat me like your slut, make me beg for it. Fuck me like a whore.”

“Jesus,” Rodney said, so turned on he was dizzy. Sheppard was pretty good at dirty talk, and had discovered a few good shortcuts to entirely cut Rodney’s brain functions off, but he usually went the other way with it, usually called Rodney filthy things. It was incredibly, intensely hot to have it reversed like this, and Rodney staggered forward, grabbed Sheppard, pulled him in and shoved his tongue into his mouth. 

Sheppard melted, there was really no other way of describing it, went completely pliant and boneless, letting Rodney shove him and turn him and pose him any way he wanted. In the occasional moments when his mouth wasn’t otherwise occupied he kept up a stream of filthy suggestions and self-debasing epithets, encouraging Rodney and inflaming him to new heights of passion. Rodney had never been so fucking turned on in his life.

Rodney got Sheppard handcuffed to the headboard, arms bent prettily up over his head— who had _pretty_ _triceps_ , of all things? Sheppard did, that’s who— and sat on his heels, slowly unbuttoning his pants and just admiring the man. The light hadn’t yet faded, though it was indirect in this corner of the room (and Rodney was going to stop leaving his curtains shut after this, he hadn’t known it was this beautiful at this hour), and Sheppard was so, so gorgeous. “I just can’t believe how fucking hot you are,” Rodney said, abandoning his own pants and leaning forward to pull Sheppard’s underwear down over his hips, so slowly, pausing to run his hands up Sheppard’s lean flanks, up to his chest. 

Sheppard made a little whining noise in his throat, arching up into Rodney’s touch. “God,” he panted, “Rodney, anything— fuck me, spank me, hurt me, mark me, take me, just don’t— don’t leave me— make me yours.” Rodney bent his head to bite and suck at Sheppard’s chin, neck, collarbone, rewarded with a twitch and a gasp or cry each time he mouthed a new spot. “Ah,” Sheppard cried, writhing under him, “Rodney, yes, nngh, harder,” spurring him on, and Rodney bit him harder, sucked bruises into his chest, down his breastbone, bit his nipple hard enough to make his whole body jerk, bit the ridge of bone at his hipbone hard enough to leave red teeth marks, and he peeled Sheppard’s underwear down off his body and threw it on the floor. 

Sheppard was making the most incredible noises, nearly sobbing, as Rodney worked his way down his thighs, avoiding his rock-hard and leaking cock. Rodney alternately bit and sucked marks into the soft skin of Sheppard’s lean inner thighs. He would never have guessed that Sheppard would like pain, would like being marked and possessed like this, but God it was hot, it was everything Rodney never knew he’d wanted. Surreptitiously Rodney slicked up his fingers while Sheppard was distracted. 

“God,” Sheppard pleaded, “Rodney, please, please— ah!— please fuck me, please, God, I’m yours, anything you want,” and Rodney latched on and bit a particularly savage mark into his left thigh, about halfway up, biting down until he almost broke skin, and as Sheppard cried out and shuddered he brought his hand up and slid a slick finger suddenly into Sheppard’s ass. 

“Yes,” Sheppard sobbed, shoving down against him, “God, yes, please, you’re all I want, ever and forever, Christ, Rodney, please.” 

It was incredibly gratifying, having him so helpless and open like this, and it gave Rodney a moment’s pause as he pushed a second finger smoothly in, opening Sheppard up. Looking at him like this, it was easy to see how much he normally held back, how much control he usually maintained, how rare it was for him to let go and just— 

And then Rodney’s stupid brain woke up and took his mouth back over and said, “Hey, wait, are you sure you want this?”

Sheppard shoved down against his hand, taking his fingers all the way in, and stared up at him, so needy and open it made Rodney’s breath catch. “Please,” he begged, “Rodney, don’t stop, don’t leave me like this.”

“I mean it, though,” Rodney said, though his arousal was busily attempting to strangle his stupid brain. “You’re drugged, aren’t you?”

“No,” Sheppard said, utterly sincere, and he was doing the puppy-dog eyes thing he did sometimes, “Rodney, please, don’t stop, I need you, I need you to do this.” He writhed, pushing down against Rodney’s fingers, and he was flushed and breathing hard and so incredibly turned-on. “Don’t leave me like this, Rodney, please.”

“But,” Rodney said. His arousal had thrown his brain to the ground and was kicking it over and over and over.

“Please,” Sheppard begged, nearly frantic. “Please.”

Rodney’s brain gave up the ghost and his arousal swept back into control triumphantly. “You want it that bad, eh?”

“God,” Sheppard moaned, writhing, “oh God, yes, Rodney, God.”

After a bit more judicious torment of Sheppard’s beautiful body Rodney stepped back to take his pants off and admire his handiwork. He’d remembered about the gag, and Sheppard’s mouth was now bisected with a strip of fabric knotted tightly behind his head. With his hands fastened above his head and his knees spread and the red marks coming up all down the length of his lithe torso and across his spread thighs, he was a scene straight out of Rodney’s deepest fantasies. 

Rodney teased him a little longer, moving closer only in little increments, torturing him by degrees. Sheppard could still mostly talk through the narrow gag, and babbled mostly incoherently, still begging and pleading with him. Only when Rodney couldn’t stand it anymore did he finally, finally let himself replace his fingers with his cock and sink slowly into Sheppard’s hot, incredibly tight body. 

Sheppard made an awesome noise and bucked up against him, taking him all the way in much faster than Rodney had intended. “Yeah,” Sheppard moaned indistinctly through the gag, “do it, fuck me hard, _hard_ , Rodney,” and Rodney bit down on the inside of his cheek because he had never been so turned on _in his life_ , and when he had gained a tiny bit of control, he set to work giving Sheppard precisely what he was asking for.

Rodney had about a nanosecond’s thought of going about this a bit more deliberately, making a concerted effort to get Sheppard off without touching his cock, but it became almost immediately apparent that he wasn’t going to last particularly long. He got his hand between them instead and started jacking Sheppard as hard and fast as he was fucking him. Sheppard’s awesome noises intensified and got less and less coherent. It tipped Rodney over the edge first, and he scrabbled wildly at Sheppard’s hips with his fingers as he lost control, vision whiting out as his hips stuttered forward. 

He closed his hand around Sheppard’s cock again as he shuddered through his own aftershocks, stripping him relentlessly until he bucked up with a muffled cry, pulsing into Rodney’s hand. “You’re so good,” Rodney told him, “Sheppard, you’re so beautiful, you’re so good.”

Sheppard subsided, trembling a little, and Rodney slowly pulled out of him and rested his head on Sheppard’s shoulder, trying to get his breath back, waiting for his heart to stop hammering so hard. Sheppard trembled intermittently, and after a while the vague notion penetrated Rodney’s beaten-down brain that Sheppard should have stopped shivering by now. 

He raised his head and looked up, and Sheppard was staring fixedly at the ceiling, jaw tight and strain around his eyes, working his wrists in tiny little motions as though he were trying to loosen the handcuffs. 

Rodney huffed a little laugh and sat up. “Stop,” he said, “I’ll get the key, gimme a second.” He slipped off the bed and went into the bathroom to get a washcloth, and on his way back located the key where it had fallen off the nightstand. “Here you go,” he said, and bent over the bed to swipe up the mess from Sheppard’s gorgeous, marked torso, and unlock the handcuffs. 

Sheppard’s wrists were bleeding and he was shaking visibly now, twisting hard against the restraints, eyes squeezed tightly shut. “Hey,” Rodney said, “hey, hang on a sec, it’s okay.”

Sheppard peeled his eyes open and gave Rodney a truly bizarre, earnest expression, manic and wide-eyed, twisted into a sort-of grin around the tight gag. “Mfine,” he said indistinctly. 

“You’ve torn your wrists all up,” Rodney said in dismay, unlocking the cuffs. Sheppard jerked his arms down to his sides and shoved himself upright, clawing at the gag, managing to yank it off. He was shaking, and gave Rodney an intensely strange bright face. 

“I’m fine,” Sheppard said, and it looked like he was shooting for cheerful and missing it by a pretty wide margin of total craziness. 

The realization slowly dawned on Rodney that Sheppard was freaking out, he was completely losing his shit, and he was doing as good a job as it was possible to do to conceal it. He’d seen Sheppard try to power through freakouts before, and this was classic— the shaking, the high tight shoulder posture, the determined set of the mouth, except for the part that the attitude Sheppard usually tried to fake was stoic reserve, not delight or whatever the fuck this was supposed to be. 

_Oh my God._ Rodney stared at him, and Sheppard shook harder, curling in on himself in what he was desperately trying to convey as a casual manner, grin stretching brittle and tight across his face. “Oh my God,” Rodney said, brain stuttering and looping as it tried to come back online. Suddenly the livid marks all up and down Sheppard’s body didn’t look so pretty anymore, and now that Rodney’s sated arousal had curled up and gone to sleep it was just his battered brain and the cool light of evening to illuminate the enormity of what he had done. 

Sheppard’s brittle grin broke and he faltered, looking suddenly miserable. “I did it wrong,” he said very quietly, as if to himself. “Good one, John.” This last was halfway to a hiss, unexpectedly venomous. 

“What have I done,” Rodney said, staring. 

“I only want to make you happy,” Sheppard said, desperate, hands twisting in the mussed-up coverlet. His wrists were bleeding, little droplets of blood showing against the stupid white coverlet. He dragged the blanket self-consciously up as if to cover himself, as if he were ashamed. He was still shaking, so hard his teeth chattered. 

“Stop,” Rodney said, and grabbed his hand, pressing the washcloth around the worst of the bleeding, holding it. Sheppard flinched involuntarily at his touch, and he knew it wasn’t out of pain at the injury— it was Sheppard’s _don’t-touch-me_ reflex in full force. That was always present, but intensified notably during freakouts. 

“Rodney,” Sheppard said, painfully earnest, “I mean it, I really mean it. I’m fine, really I am, I just got scared for a second, it’s cool now.” He was still shaking and by now his jaw had locked up so his mouth didn’t really open. Rodney had noticed sometimes that happened, but usually only when shit was really, really bad and Sheppard had clamped down with everything he had to try and keep himself under control. “Please,” Sheppard said so tightly he was nearly whispering, “please, I— I just wanna be good enough for you.”

“Sheppard,” Rodney said, his heart breaking. He should go, should get away from him and get the antidote for him. And when he did, he was pretty sure Sheppard wasn’t going to forgive him for this. 

“Please don’t leave me,” Sheppard whispered, and for probably the first time in their long acquaintance the man was visibly near tears. He had his shoulders hunched and he looked absolutely devastated. “I’m such a screw-up,” he went on, to himself, eyes closed. 

“No,” Rodney said, and he couldn’t do it, he couldn’t leave him like this. And Sheppard was only going to be madder at him for this, but he slid closer and put his arms around Sheppard, pulling him down into the bed and wrapping himself up in the blankets with him. “No, Sheppard, you’re not, you’re good, you’re so good.”

Sheppard put his forehead against Rodney’s chest, clinging desperately to him, still shivering. “Don’t leave me,” he whispered again. “I can do better. I’ll do it better.”

“No,” Rodney said, “no, Sheppard, you’re perfect. You didn’t do anything wrong.” 

“I’m not,” Sheppard said quietly, but his trembling was easing, which was good because Rodney had no idea what else to do. “But you are, Rodney. You’re perfect and I love you.”

Rodney closed his eyes. Christ, if only he could pretend that was really Sheppard saying that. What a rush that would be. He kissed the top of Sheppard’s head. “You’re so good,” he murmured. “You know what would make me happy? Tell me if I hurt you. I want to know. I really do. Did I really hurt you anywhere?”

“No,” Sheppard said. “No, nothing hurts.” Which had to be a lie, he’d done a real number on his wrists. 

“Sheppard,” Rodney said, a little more firmly. “I hurt you on purpose, I have to have managed to do something that whole time.”

Sheppard didn’t answer for a long moment, pressed against him. “I guess I bruised my wrists,” he said finally. He had stopped shaking, at least, but wasn’t much less tense. 

“Why did you do that?” Rodney asked. 

“I, I just,” Sheppard said, “I’m like a wild animal in a trap, I just go crazy sometimes, Rodney, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to.”

“You hate being tied up,” Rodney said softly. “Of course you do and I knew that.”

“No,” Sheppard said, not looking at him, vibrating with tension. “No, I like it, I like the way you look at me, I just screwed it up at the end, I forgot and I panicked.”

“You didn’t screw up,” Rodney said, kissing Sheppard’s head again. He took the man’s face in his hands and turned it up to him. Sheppard had his eyes squeezed shut and looked miserable. “And I’d look at you like that anyway.” He kissed Sheppard’s nose, and Sheppard blinked his eyes open in surprise. “You’re perfect. John. Look at me. You’re perfect.”

Sheppard gave him a long, considering look. His eyes were a luminous green in this light, his lips soft and kiss-swollen and parted ever-so-slightly. He licked his lips slowly, searching Rodney’s face. Whatever he found there seemed to ease him somewhat, and he smiled a little hesitantly. “Is it okay?” he asked. 

“Yes,” Rodney said. “Yes, it’s okay.” It was as far from okay as it was possible to be, but looking at Sheppard’s face in that moment it was almost impossible to grasp just how incredibly screwed Rodney was once Sheppard sobered up. “It’s so okay that we’re going to take a nap right here, just like this, and just snuggle until you feel better.”

“Okay,” Sheppard said happily, and curled up trustingly in Rodney’s arms. Which was approximately the fastest he’d ever seen the man recover from a freakout of that degree. Rodney warred with himself over whether it was worth confessing this to Carson in the approximate possibility that the drug actually contained some useful compound in treating PTSD, or whether he’d have to incriminate himself so thoroughly that nobody would ever take him seriously about potential benefits. 

He fell asleep mulling it over, and wasn’t really surprised when he woke some hours later and Sheppard was gone. 

 


	6. Needs vs. Wants

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> All of AR-1 gets caught up in the aftermath of Rodney's ill-advised experiment.

Ronon sought Sheppard out to spar, wanting to feel like he was back in control of his own body and desires again and thinking there was no better method for it than to beat on Sheppard’s inspirationally-determined skinny ass, but couldn’t find him. He wandered a fair distance, winding up going for a bit of a run when he finally abandoned the search, and after a while he gave up, went back to his own quarters, showered, and changed. 

He still wasn’t over the novelty of the showers here. They were so wasteful, so extravagant, but then, atop an ocean, it probably wasn’t anyone’s concern how much water they used. In Sateda the fashion had been hip baths, or cold standing spongebaths for anyone who wasn’t a child or elderly or sick or at some sensitive part of childbearing. There was a lot of decadence here, and Ronon was becoming inured to it at least. 

He squeezed his hair approximately dry and wandered back over to Sheppard’s quarters, starting to really wonder where the guy was. He’d given up on sparring him, but now he was curious about his disappearance. Sheppard was usually a pretty easy guy to find. 

He swiped at the chime and waited, but it was clear nobody was there. Eventually he turned away, wandering back down the hall. The only place he hadn’t checked was the jumper bay. After the sheer number of hours Sheppard had been spending crammed in one of those things with McKay, Ronon hadn’t figured he’d want to voluntarily spend time there. 

Sheppard’s door opened, a distance behind him by now, and he turned back. Sheppard was looking out, frowning in puzzlement. Looking the wrong way. “Hey,” Ronon said. 

Sheppard looked at him, and his face cleared. “Oh,” he said. “Hey.” He jerked a thumb back over his shoulder. “I was, I was in the shower, couldn’t answer the chime. What’s up?”

Ronon wandered back over, and paused, frowning. Sheppard looked haggard, tired, hollow-eyed, like he’d just come back from a bad mission. He was even in the clothes he wore to sleep, the t-shirt and track pants, like he’d just gotten changed. He dressed like that when he was wounded, too. “Nothin’,” Ronon said. “Just lookin’ for ya.”

“Did you need me?” Sheppard asked. 

Ronon shrugged. “No, but I thought it was weird when I couldn’t find you. I was gonna ask if you wanted to spar but I went for a run instead.”

Sheppard nodded thoughtfully, eyes sliding up to him and away, and he had his lips between his teeth like he was worried about something or wanted to ask for something. “Oh,” he said. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to vanish.”

“Mnot your taskmaster,” Ronon said with a shrug. He frowned. “You don’t look so good. Your cold worse?”

“No,” Sheppard said, “no, I—“ He waved a hand. “Detoxing from that stupid herb.”

Ronon frowned deeper. “I thought it didn’t affect you.”

“Only because I wasn’t close enough to Lucius for long enough,” John said. “But that meant I didn’t bother with the antidote, and so when fucking McKay decided to sample the herb to see what it was like…”

“Oh yeah,” Ronon said. He gave Sheppard a wide-eyed look. “Did you really clean his quarters?”

“Yup,” Sheppard said wearily, rubbing his face. He stepped back away from the door, waving Ronon in.

“He didn’t even try to stop you?” Ronon asked. “What an asshole. Want me to dangle him by his ankles off a balcony for a while?”

“No,” Sheppard said. He swiped the door closed and went tiredly over to sit on his couch, moving a bit stiffly. “He didn’t show up until I was done anyway. Pretty sure he forgot he’d done that.”

Ronon shook his head, and sat in the chair. “He’s kind of a dick to you,” he said. 

“Yeah,” Sheppard said, and Ronon frowned again. Usually Sheppard defended McKay. He had to have done something pretty bad. Ronon knew they were fucking, sometimes anyway, and generally approved— he liked McKay much better than he let on, generally, because it was fun to watch the guy squirm and also it was a reasonably good idea not to let the guy take you for granted, like he did with Sheppard— but sometimes he felt like they did more damage to one another than good. And this was one of those times. 

“Did he make you do other stuff?” Ronon asked, a sick certainty congealing in his gut. 

“No,” Sheppard said too quickly, looking away. “No, it was just— the whole thing was so confusing, and I feel so stupid because I’d just watched all of you dealin’ with the same exact thing, but when it was me I just thought wow this is so great, of course whatever the hell I feel so compelled to do is perfectly fucking normal.” He shook his head, shoulders tight, grin tight and fake and his eyes so, so shadowed. 

“Yeah, exactly,” Ronon said. “I felt like a total idiot when it wore off. I can’t believe McKay did that.”

“I think he forgot he’d taken it,” Sheppard mumbled, but it had the air of the kind of lies people tell themselves when the truth is just too nasty to bear. 

 

 

 

 

Someone grabbed Rodney’s chair and yanked it violently backward away from his desk, and Rodney flailed and squawked in alarm. He’d retreated to his lab to lose himself in work while he waited for the herb’s effects to wear off so he could maybe start thinking about what the hell he was ever going to say to Sheppard. And now apparently there was a prank war in the lab? He recovered his balance and turned to see who the perpetrator was, prepared to unleash destruction upon them, when a pair of hands descended and caught him by the front of his shirt, hauling him with terrifying ease up and out of the chair and within a couple inches of Ronon’s glowering visage. 

“What the fuck did you do to Sheppard?” Ronon growled, and he looked really, really angry. 

Fuck. This was a revolting development he had not forseen. “I, um,” Rodney said weakly. 

Ronon dropped him, then grabbed him by the back of the shirt instead and hauled him out the door. The lab was mostly deserted, but Rodney saw Radek’s startled face for an instant as they went by, and then they were in a transporter. It opened out onto a deserted hallway and Ronon threw him staggering out the door. 

He tripped and fell and lay on his side, curled into a ball, for a while, and nothing happened. Finally he looked up. Ronon was standing over him, arms folded, looking down. “What the fuck,” Ronon repeated, “did you do to Sheppard?”

“He’s not okay, huh?” Rodney asked miserably. 

“He’s fuckin’,” Ronon gestured angrily, “twitchy and miserable and won’t fuckin’ tell me anything. Says he cleaned your quarters for you. Says that’s it. But there’s no fuckin’ way that’s it, McKay.”

Rodney sighed and pushed himself up to a sitting position. “I’d probably feel better about it if you’d just beat the shit out of me and get it over with,” he said. 

“Aren’t you supposed to be some kind of genius?” Ronon asked. He was really, truly upset, it wasn’t hard to see that. 

“Math,” Rodney said. “Not people or, you know, common sense. I forgot about the herb, and then I remembered, but he was so upset and thought I was mad at him when I tried to stop him, and I didn’t know what to do.”

“So you just kept letting him do whatever it was that he was doing for you,” Ronon concluded, dropping to a crouch to glare more effectively from Rodney’s level. Rodney shrank back a little. 

“Yes,” he said. 

“Did you hurt him?” Ronon asked, eyes narrowed. 

“No,” Rodney said. “Well— I asked him, of course, if he was hurt, and he insisted he wasn’t, of course, and then he was upset because he thought he’d screwed up because why would I be asking him that, and it was a mess. And I’m trying to stay away from him until everything has worn off.”

“It has,” Ronon said. “C’mon, you’re gonna go talk to him.”

“I was planning on that,  yes,” Rodney said waspishly, “you don’t have to drag me there.”

“I don’t,” Ronon said, “but it’s either that or put your head through the wall and leave you here to bleed, so I think you’d rather get dragged there.” He grabbed the front of Rodney’s shirt and hauled him up to his feet. “Listen to me, McKay,” he said, his voice dropping to a growling near-whisper, intensely angry, “it’s none of my business what you and Sheppard do in your private time if you’re both into it. But on Sateda the very, very worst crime you can commit—“

“It’s pretty bad on Earth too,” Rodney said, summoning all of his courage to interrupt, “and it’s not something I ever meant to do, least of all to him. You have to believe that, Ronon.”

Ronon gave him a long, considering glower, and shook his head slowly. “On Sateda we put people to death for it,” he said. 

“Come on!” Rodney exclaimed, too annoyed to be as terrified as he knew he should be with Ronon’s big hands fisted in the front of his shirt. “I’m the biggest coward that has ever lived and I still care enough to risk my neck for Sheppard on a regular basis. I wouldn’t hurt him on purpose.”

Ronon shoved him backward against the wall, rather hard, then yanked him back into the transporter. “Sometimes I think you don’t care about anyone, McKay,” he said.

Rodney caught his balance and yanked his shirt out of Ronon’s grasp as the transporter flashed. “That’s almost true,” he said, “but I care about Sheppard. And I care about Teyla. I even care about you but I don’t know why, if you’re so fast to leap to the worst possible conclusion.”

 

 

 

Teyla’s radio crackled. “Teyla, do you copy? This is Zelenka. Teyla, do you copy?”

“I am here, Radek,” she said, concerned. 

“Do you know of any reason why Ronon would murder McKay?” Zelenka asked. 

She considered a flippant reply, but one of the other scientists beat her to it, with a snippy “Get in line!”

“Get off channel,” Zelenka snarled absently. 

“Is this a current situation?” Teyla asked. 

“Yes, he just dragged Rodney from lab by collar growling something about Sheppard,” Zelenka said. 

“I will investigate,” Teyla said. ‘Thank you.”

 

 

John looked bleakly at himself in the mirror, twisting a little and grimacing to see the dull marks of fingernail scratches on the back of his hip. Jesus, Rodney. He shivered, and pulled his t-shirt on over his head to cover the marks. He looked like a leech-attack victim. 

He walked out of the bathroom and picked his charcoal-and-black uniform jacket off the back of the chair where he’d put it. He put it on, zipped it up to his chin with the thought to be grateful Rodney at least hadn’t marked his neck, and picked his headset up off the desk. It was buzzing, and it sounded like Teyla’s voice, but when he put it to his ear it was silent. He waited a moment, thinking that if he had just missed a hail it would be repeated, but there was no more chatter. After a moment a Marine buzzed a routine check-in and was answered, and John shook his head and sat to pull his boots on. 

They had to keep scouting for gates, and that meant he had to sit in a tiny enclosed space in a jumper with McKay for hours, and that meant he had to sort out whether he was going to kill the guy or not. Because if he was going to, he should probably do that and get it over with, skip straight to the murder trial and avoid the hours of boredom first. 

He wore civilian boots. If he wasn’t tramping through undergrowth or marching somewhere or making a first impression on potential allies, he was going to wear comfortable shoes. He laced them up, stood up and buckled on his sidearm holster and equipment belt. 

His door chime sounded and he glared over at it for a moment. If that was Rodney, it was going to take a great deal of self-control not to punch him. He breathed carefully in, then out as he walked over and opened the door. 

It was Teyla. “John,” she said, and looked past him. Making sure no one else was there? “Are you all right?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?” John answered, wary. He stepped back to let her in, but she stood in the doorway, not entering. 

“Zelenka reported that Ronon just stormed into the lab and hauled McKay out, shouting something about you, so I thought perhaps I should check up on you first and see if I could ascertain what Ronon might be upset about.” Her eyes settled on his face, considering. 

“Fuck,” John said, “Ronon,” and they both heard the transporter door open and heard McKay’s indignant _let me go!_  

John followed Teyla out into the hall. Ronon had Rodney by the back of the collar and was propelling him down the hallway, his face a glowering mask of fury. “Ronon,” John said, letting his voice go hard and cold, “stand down.”

“McKay’s got some explaining to do,” Ronon said, and shoved Rodney forward so that he staggered wildly. Rodney scrambled to catch his balance, indignantly straightening his shirt, but he didn’t meet John’s eyes. 

“Does he,” Teyla said. “Ronon, why does Rodney need to explain himself to you?”

“Not me,” Ronon said. “He took that herb stuff and Sheppard didn’t have the antidote, and he knew that.”

Teyla’s mouth opened and closed, and she turned to look at McKay. “Rodney,” she said, shocked. After a brief moment she turned back to John, expression blank. “Did you really clean his quarters?”

John pinched the bridge of his nose. “Yes,” he said. “Guys. Jeez.”

“I know,” Rodney said, “I know that was wrong, I know that I didn’t consider the ramifications of my actions, I know all of that. I know I owe John an apology and more. I know it was a major betrayal of trust. I know all of this, Ronon, and it is a matter between myself and the colonel, and I do not need you to drag me around by the shirt collar over it. I don’t know if enough time has passed for the effects to fade totally, so I was staying away from Sheppard until I was certain. The last thing I want is to repeat the experience.”

“It’s worn off,” Ronon said. 

“Easy, Chewie,” John said, guts churning— at least Rodney admitted he’d been wrong. John had been dully certain that McKay would assume everything was peachy and would happily go on in denial. He wasn’t sure he would have had the strength to correct him, in that case. “No need to get violent.”

“On Sateda taking someone against their will, or using coercion to persuade them, was the worst possible crime,” Ronon said, and it was probably the longest sentence John had ever heard him say. John glanced over and Teyla was staring stone-faced at Rodney as well. 

“This is taboo among my people as well,” Teyla said icily.

Christ, of course they both knew about him and Rodney. And boy, did they know Rodney. John rubbed the back of his neck. He was mortified, and offended, but strangely, something inside him was a little moved, that these two would so aggressively have his back. He’d never… he’d never had _advocates_ before. 

“Guys,” John said. “Hey. I appreciate the concern. But this is Rodney, remember? He’s on our team.”

“Sometimes those we are closest to are capable of the greatest harm,” Teyla said. 

John considered that, and tilted his head at her, conceding the point. Rodney had finally managed to look at him, and was staring now, eyes wide with maybe hope, maybe something else, John didn’t really want to look. “Thing is, he hasn’t done anything to me I haven’t asked him to,” John said, “so maybe cut him a little bit of slack. What he did was incredibly shitty, and I’m probably going to beat the shit out of him for it, and he’ll be lucky if I ever forgive him, but it’s not something that I need backup to do.” 

Teyla and Ronon looked at one another, then back at him. He still wasn’t looking at Rodney. “So um,” he went on. “Thanks. I… it means a lot, guys. But I got this.”

Ronon stepped a little closer to him, looking intently at him. John turned and looked up at him, submitting to what he realized was an inspection, and Ronon peered into his face. “If you’re sure,” Ronon said. 

“I am,” John said. “Rodney’s still on the team. If he and I have a problem, we’ll work it out between us.” 

Ronon stepped back, and looked over at Teyla. She gave John a long, considering look, then looked at Ronon. Ronon nodded. He turned to Rodney. “Then I’m sorry,” he said. “But it’s better to be sure.” He turned and stalked stiffly away, and Teyla looked from Rodney to John and nodded gravely before she turned and followed him. 

The transporter doors closed behind them, and John stood for a long moment with his arms crossed over his chest, looking at Rodney. It took Rodney a little bit before he met John’s gaze. “Thank you,” he said. “I thought Ronon was going to kill me.”

“I didn’t do it for you,” John said. No, he was too angry to go on a scout with Rodney right now. He turned around and went back to his door. 

Rodney followed. “Sheppard,” he said, “I meant it, I wasn’t just saying it because I was scared of Ronon. I am sorry. I was wrong. I never, never meant to hurt you.”

“Maybe not, but you did,” John said, pausing at the door and looking back at him. 

Rodney’s face twisted. “John,” he said quietly. 

He couldn’t know, he couldn’t, what kind of effect that had on John, using his name like that— Teyla knew, Elizabeth knew, but Rodney just wasn’t that observant. Not about people. He didn’t know what it did to John. Couldn’t know what _he_ did to John. 

If he did, he was evil.

John stared at his door for a moment, gathered himself, and turned back. “Let’s take this out of the hallway,” he gritted out between his teeth.

 

Rodney followed him in and stood anxiously in the middle of his floor as the door whooshed shut. John puttered around the room for a moment, putting things away that he’d meant to before he left, tidying up the magazines on the nightstand, turning off the light in the bathroom, hanging the towel up neatly, drying his razor and putting it back into his shaving kit. When he came back out, Rodney was in the same spot, but his expression had shifted to one of resolve, chin lifted a little. 

“There’s no excusing what I did,” Rodney said. “Especially since I know you’ve been hurt before. It was foolish, it was careless, and you’re absolutely right to be angry.”

“This is the part where you remind me that I was literally asking for it,” John said, “and that I should forgive you anyway, right?” He clearly remembered the shock on Rodney’s face after Doranda, when John had refused to immediately accept his apology. 

Rodney’s chin didn’t lift, though. Instead he lowered his head. “No,” he said. “You were there. You know exactly what happened. I know how the herb affects people, I remember the things I did. I know you know exactly what you did, and how I responded. And you know that I knew exactly what was going on.” He looked at his hands, fidgeted with them, didn’t look up. “A man likes to keep certain illusions about himself,” he went on. “When he hears of people doing reprehensible things, he likes to be able to think that he’d never stoop to such levels, he’d never be so weak or foolish or selfish.” He shook his head. “I am only sorry that you had to be hurt in order for me to find out the extent of my own weakness.”

John gritted his teeth to keep from saying anything consoling. Rodney didn’t really deserve consolation for this. Rodney wasn’t the wronged party. But then, what did John expect? 

His anger left him on an exhalation and he rubbed his face, just tired now. It was late evening, awfully late to be embarking on any missions, but he’d meant to get one more scout in today, and it wasn’t like he was going to sleep anyway. “Whatever,” he said. “You got your shit together? We should go scout out that last gate, I wanted to get it done before tomorrow.”

Rodney stared at him blankly. “What?”

“One more scout,” John said. “Before all of this, that’s what we were doing this evening. I still want to get that done.”

Yes, it meant being alone together in a puddlejumper for hours. But they had to get back on the horse that threw ‘em. The lesson had been a little more literal in John’s youth, but it applied here too. 

“But,” Rodney said. 

“But nothing,” John said. “There’s work to do.”

“Don’t you need,” Rodney said, but stuttered to a halt. 

“Need is a strong word,” John said. “Lots of times, things you think you really need, it turns out, are things you just want. And things you want, you can live without.” He realized what he was missing, and went to the bedside table to retrieve his watch and his wristband. He kept his face impassive, not flinching so Rodney wouldn’t see how it hurt as he worked both into place over his bandaged, battered wrists. 

“Is that any way to live, though?” Rodney asked, mouth downturned; he’d seen the bandages, and he was pretty good at reading John. He’d probably noticed anyway. 

John checked his sidearm magazine and holstered the gun. “It’s gotten me this far,” he said, and walked out the door. 

 

 


End file.
